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

From: "Ashish Dalela (adalela)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 11:27:42 +0530

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