The recent Amazon Web Services outage reminded us once again that cloud computing is not yet a perfect science. That said, perhaps it's also time we define formal methods, models, and approaches to make cloud computing easier to understand -- and more reliable.
Most organizations that implement cloud computing view clouds as a simple collection of services or APIs; they use the cloud functions, such as storage and compute, through these services. When they implement cloud computing services, they see it as just a matter of mixing and matching these services in an application or process to form the solution.
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The trouble with that approach? There is a single layer of services that most cloud users see that exposes the cloud computing functions. Thus, all types of services exist at this layer, from primitive to high level, from coarse to fine grained.
Although it's not at all a new concept, in many instances it's helpful to define cloud services using a layered approach that works up from the most primitive to the highest-level services, with the higher-level services depending on those at the lower levels. Many IaaS clouds already work this way internally. However, all exposed services, primitive or not, are pretty much treated the same: as one layer.
A better approach would be for each layer to have a common definition from cloud provider to cloud provider. Each layer would provide a specific set of predefined levels of support. For example:
- Layer 0: Hardware services
- Layer 1: Virtualization service (if required)
- Layer 2: Storage
- Layer 3: Compute
- Layer 4: Data
- Layer 5: Tenant management
- Layer 6: Application
- Layer 7: Process
- Layer 8: Management
Of course, this is just a concept. I suspect the layers will change to represent the purpose and functions of each cloud.
