Subject: Re: [sop] two architectures - which one do you prefer?

From: "Ashish Dalela (adalela)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:02:21 +0530

BTW, these may not be the only architectures out there. So, if anyone
believes there are more architectures, it would be great to have that in
the discussion. I'm just familiar with two of them, so hope to hear if
there are more. I realize that "God" may be a strong word for some
people (J), but we could replace this with the word "controller" without
loss of meaning.

Thanks, Ashish

From: Ashish Dalela (adalela) 
Sent: Monday, February 20, 2012 11:28 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: two architectures - which one do you prefer?

Folks,

There are two dominant architectures being pushed for cloud in the
industry today.

1.  Application is the God of the datacenter. All infrastructure is food
supplied to the application to continue its operation, and additional
infrastructure is provisioned if an application asks for it. The
"management" of the infrastructure is in the application, because the
infrastructure really exists for the purposes of the application. You
obviously have to often re-write or re-design or at the least enhance
your applications to be able to orchestrate the infrastructure. 

2.  A new God is created for both infrastructure and application. In
this model, some new controller monitors both application and
infrastructure, holds the policies for which application / user can have
which resources, how much a user has to be billed for a type of service,
etc. You don't have to re-write your applications but you have to create
an additional control layer on top of infrastructure and application.
You want this additional layer to be as flat as possible, but allow
sufficient abstractions for easy control.

These obviously entail different architectures, from an application
control standpoint. In the first model, the application controls itself
and the infrastructure. In the second model, the application is also a
resource along with infrastructure, managed by some external controller.

Any discussion or comments on these two models?

Thanks, Ashish

---

From: Adam Greenhalgh <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 10:02:56 +0000

I suspect that in fact the model that might come to the fore is a hybrid of these two, where the application is the "God" of a zone of the data centre and a "Greater God" oversees the bigger picture for the whole datacenter. The complexity is going to come from the interaction between these "Gods". 

Adam

On 20 Feb 2012, at 09:32, Ashish Dalela (adalela) wrote:

>  
> BTW, these may not be the only architectures out there. So, if anyone believes there are more architectures, it would be great to have that in the discussion. I’m just familiar with two of them, so hope to hear if there are more. I realize that “God” may be a strong word for some people (J), but we could replace this with the word “controller” without loss of meaning.
>  
> Thanks, Ashish
>  
> There are two dominant architectures being pushed for cloud in the industry today.
>                                                                                             
> 1.  Application is the God of the datacenter. All infrastructure is food supplied to the application to continue its operation, and additional infrastructure is provisioned if an application asks for it. The “management” of the infrastructure is in the application, because the infrastructure really exists for the purposes of the application. You obviously have to often re-write or re-design or at the least enhance your applications to be able to orchestrate the infrastructure.
>  
> 2.  A new God is created for both infrastructure and application. In this model, some new controller monitors both application and infrastructure, holds the policies for which application / user can have which resources, how much a user has to be billed for a type of service, etc. You don’t have to re-write your applications but you have to create an additional control layer on top of infrastructure and application. You want this additional layer to be as flat as possible, but allow sufficient abstractions for easy control.
>  
> These obviously entail different architectures, from an application control standpoint. In the first model, the application controls itself and the infrastructure. In the second model, the application is also a resource along with infrastructure, managed by some external controller.
>  
> _______________________________________________
> sop mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/sop

---

From: "Ashish Dalela (adalela)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:51:07 +0530

Yes, and a related model is that a zone (POD) has one type of
application and that is controlled by a separate domain specific
controller. So, you could tier the controllers. I guess I'm still
wondering how "deep" the application wants to control the
infrastructure. 

Thanks, Ashish

-----Original Message-----
From: Adam Greenhalgh (agreenha) 
Sent: Monday, February 20, 2012 3:33 PM
To: [email-masked]
Cc: Ashish Dalela (adalela)
Subject: Re: [sop] two architectures - which one do you prefer?

I suspect that in fact the model that might come to the fore is a hybrid
of these two, where the application is the "God" of a zone of the data
centre and a "Greater God" oversees the bigger picture for the whole
datacenter. The complexity is going to come from the interaction between
these "Gods". 

Adam

industry today.

> 1.  Application is the God of the datacenter. All infrastructure is
food supplied to the application to continue its operation, and
additional infrastructure is provisioned if an application asks for it.
The "management" of the infrastructure is in the application, because
the infrastructure really exists for the purposes of the application.
You obviously have to often re-write or re-design or at the least
enhance your applications to be able to orchestrate the infrastructure.

---

From: Michael Hammer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:32:57 -0500

If you treat the "cloud" like a computer, then an OS needs to ensure that
each application plays in its own sandbox and had minimal interactions with
other applications.  The only interaction being the sharing of computer,
memory, and network resources.

If you abdicate responsibility to the applications, then you have no
security.  That would not be good.
I don't see how you would get around this.  The fathers of the Internet
confess that trusting the end-users to behave correctly because they were
trust-worthy was a  mistake.  We should not make that mistake once again.

Mike