Datasheet
24 Part I Overview of Commerce
Defining pre-approved requests. This is an operational step that will
enable the operations that are performed within a pre-defined framework
to bypass most approval levels.
The definition of a service catalog that exposes a self-service interface to
the cloud users.
SLA-Driven Management
The management of IT services based on service level agreements (SLA) provides a
way to describe contracts between the provider and the users. These contracts can
be used to drive the behavior of the cloud computing infrastructure by defining
multiple classes of service. The maximum efficiency of the cloud infrastructure
is achieved when the resources are assigned to best-effort classes of service that
can be preempted (or repurposed) to satisfy higher levels of service.
SLA along with chargeback can also be used as incentives to drive a specific
behavior to cloud users.
Automation
Operation automation, especially the automation of routine tasks, is contribut-
ing to the infrastructure efficiency by:
Reducing the human cost to manage the resources
Decreasing the manual time to recovery (MTTR) by enabling automated
remediation
Increasing availability by reducing human errors
Enabling efficient resource management though repurposing
Capturing the tribal knowledge in well-documented workflows
Self-Healing
In addition to self-healing, a cloud computing infrastructure is more resilient
to localized failures because of its level of automation and the focus on achiev-
ing the SLA. Because the allocation mechanism is dynamic, users will not (and
should not) be concerned about where their workload is running. However, this
information has to be available for cases where automation is not implemented.
This will effectively eliminate traditional remediation methods. The cloud
computing management system should address the remediation process, and
also include the human approval, if your company requires it.
624463c01.indd 24 3/29/11 2:26:36 AM