Building a private cloud is not a quick job nor a job simply related to IT. Right from defining your cloud requirements and setting up goals to implementing the right strategy and documenting everything, the entire process requires a rigorous approach and involvement of the entire business organization.
Danny AFAHOUNKO
Cloud Architect |
CEO & FOUNDER of Cloud Inspire
Danny has a wide experience in digital transformation, having accompanied many companies in different industries across Africa and France through their cloud journey. Danny is a cloud expert and his objective at Cloud Inspire is to make cloud adoption accessible in Africa.
10 key steps to build a private cloud.
1. Define your cloud objectives and Plan
Many organizations fail to leverage private cloud solutions owing to unrealistic goals and expectations. Organizations need to define a clear vision and document a cloud strategic plan considering all the problems and pain points faced by all stakeholders and developers and how the cloud is going to solve them with short-term goals as well as long-term goals.
2. Know your services
While outlining cloud requirements align with the organization’s business goals, understanding the services helps in successfully implementing the right technology stack. Identify the workloads to run and how capacity planning can be optimized. Questions such as what is the footprint, how to implement containerization, how to integrate them with the existing infrastructure, what are the metrics and how to set up SLAs should be answered. Most importantly, organizations should understand the cost of existing services and the total TCO analysis.
3. Standardisation of operations for automation and shared resources
In a private cloud deployment, standardization acts as a strong base for IT operations. While choosing the right hardware and software components for the private cloud, flexibility, automation and integration should be highly prioritized. Else, integration of disparate systems turns out to be complex and costly. Building the infrastructure in a pod design allows for the standardization of physical components as well as other individual software components.
4. Documentation of the entire processes
Documentation is a process of capturing all the information required to execute the cloud architectural design. It serves as a roadmap for the organization’s cloud operations. Be it creating new services or modifying the existing ones, documentation serves as a repository source to understand the intent and execution of processes across the organization. It enhances consistency in processes, enables process improvement, and provides clarity by reducing operational ambiguity while serving as the best tool to train new employees. Failing to document the cloud process puts the organization at risk.
5. Cloud Component Tiers
The private cloud architecture comprises four key components.
- Resource Tier: The base tier, also called the resource tier consists of the resources such as the infrastructure, software and hardware along with virtualization and provision automation systems.
- Resource Management Tier: The resource management tier sits on the resource tier, enabling administrators to manage resources.
- Service Management Tier: The service management tier comprising service governance and service level management sits at the next level to service-level interface to users.
- Access Management Tier: The access management tier comprises user interfaces that let users view and manage service catalogues and subscriptions.
6. Monitoring the performance
While a private cloud gives more visibility and better control over the infrastructure, monitoring IT workloads cannot be ignored. The cloud monitoring strategy should be a collective work of developers, operations staff and site reliability engineers (SREs), focusing on maintaining service-level objectives to deliver a higher user experience. Databases, virtual machines, websites, virtual networking and cloud storage are some of the changing components that require continuous monitoring.
7. Resource usage tracking
A private cloud offers a highly scalable infrastructure that will charge only for the resources used. As such, identifying and optimizing mismanaged and idle resources, right-sizing computing services and making use of discounts on spot instances and reserved instances will reduce the overall cloud spending. Utilizing heat maps will serve a great purpose. Cloud optimization should also be included in the cloud strategy.
8. Security
A private cloud offers a highly scalable infrastructure that will charge only for the resources used. As such, identifying and optimizing mismanaged and idle resources, right-sizing computing services and making use of discounts on spot instances and reserved instances will reduce the overall cloud spending. Utilizing heat maps will serve a great purpose. Cloud optimization should also be included in the cloud strategy.
9. Future-proofing the infrastructure
As the cloud innovates at a rapid pace, future-proofing your cloud architecture is highly recommended. Creating a flexible and modular design with service models installed closer to distributed services and applications will improve responsiveness, performance, observability and help in troubleshooting. Self-serving IT systems are the need of the hour.
10. Imbibing the right culture across the organization
While cloud computing is all about tools and processes, they are ineffective without the right people assigned to the right tasks. Today, cloud technologies are not just confined to the IT department but extend to the board-level leadership and the first-level staff. As such, imbibing the cloud culture should start at the top and involve every stakeholder. Aligning everyone’s vision and building the right cloud team makes the cloud journey easy and productive.
You are now all set to start the planning of your private hosted cloud. Should you be looking for more in-depth knowledge on cloud computing, we are launching a series of webinars and trainings on how to build a private hosted cloud.
In our training courses, we will bring in a conceptual as well as technical approach with practical exercises.
More info: Check out our Special Offer
Be updated with regular Private Cloud News.
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