Despite the significant momentum and industry buzz about cloud computing, only a fraction of organizations have an enterprise cloud. Most organizations are still planning their cloud transition strategy while incrementally improving traditional IT services and modernizing data centers. Consolidating enterprise datacenters and implementing server virtualization and automation are critical components of any modernization initiative; however, virtualization and automation are only part of the transition to a cloud environment. Although shifting workloads and commodity information technology (IT) services to a third-party hosting provider is not a new trend, cloud computing is a new style of delivering IT that provides on-demand elastic computing capacity through self-service ordering and automated provisioning systems. We have seen our first generation of public cloud providers, enterprise customers building private clouds, and more recently, a shift toward the hybrid cloud. With only a fraction of worldwide organizations already migrating to the cloud, the migration of internal enterprise IT to the cloud will be the most significant transformation within the IT industry.
The shift of traditional on-premises enterprise IT systems (e.g., server farms, storage, networks, and applications) to hosted cloud-based datacenters and providers will dominate the industry over the next 10 years. Cloud-based virtual machines (VMs), storage, and mobile applications are now common and widely available to customers; however, the available public cloud services are still in the childhood years of sophistication and feature depth. The Enterprise Cloud: Best Practices for Transforming Legacy IT will provide insider knowledge and lessons learned regarding planning, architecture, deployment, security, management, and hybrid and cloud brokering—technologies and processes that are now the dominant concerns and focus for enterprise IT organizations. As a cloud subject matter expert with significant hands-on experience, I am constantly asked for more information on what I’ve learned, the necessary business process changes, and the best practices to transition from enterprise IT to a cloud-computing environment. Based on real customers and providers, in commercial and public sector industries, this book also chronicles some of the many successes as well as the less-than-successful cloud deployments, and provides valuable lessons from which we can all learn.
This book will help you understand the best practices based on actual field experience transitioning on-premises enterprise IT services to a cloud-based environment. Whether you are still planning or ready to implement your long-term cloud strategy, this book will help you evaluate existing cloud technologies and service providers. I cover the cloud from two perspectives: as a consumer of cloud services and as an owner/operator of your own enterprise private or hybrid cloud. Knowledge acquired in the real world is analyzed from the perspectives of operations, security, billing and finance, application transformation, and deployment. Each of these learned lessons are then converted into best practice checklists to save you and your organizations countless dollars and time.
Here is a glance at what is in each chapter:
Each chapter in this book provides an analysis of knowledge acquired by industry-leading cloud providers and early-adopter enterprise customers. The chapters are organized by topics such as planning and architecture, deployment, finance and procurement, security, cloud management, and hybrid/brokering. At the end of each chapter, a summary of recommended best practices is provided to help you incorporate all of this amassed experience into your cloud transition. Finally, the last chapter provides an analysis of industry trends and how the industry is expected to evolve over the next few years.
This book is designed for business and IT executives. I focus on real-world best practices and guidance for planning, deploying, migrating, and managing IT in a cloud computing environment. I provide the knowledge and guidance necessary for executives to make decisions on how best to adopt cloud services and transform from traditionally managed datacenter services to a service-oriented cloud environment. Primary focus is placed on the following:
Real-world lessons learned and how to apply them to your organization’s adoption and transformation from internal enterprise IT to cloud.
Converting lessons learned into best practices in key areas such as operations, security, billing, deployment, application transformation, cloud management systems, and brokering.
Providing an understanding of hybrid cloud computing and the future of datacenter modernization.
Defining cloud brokering and Anything as a Service (XaaS) aggregation and arbitration across multiple cloud providers.
Projecting the future of cloud computing: we’ll review the challenges of the early years of cloud computing and pinpoint where organizations need to focus for the next-generation clouds.
The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
This element signifies an industry trend for enterprise clouds and is labeled as such.
This element signifies a key take-away from the text and is labeled as such.
This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, if examples are offered with this book, you may use it in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the system design examples, diagrams, or best practices checklists. For example, writing documentation that uses several chunks of examples from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting system design examples, diagrams, or best practice checklists does not require permission.
We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “The Enterprise Cloud by James Bond (O’Reilly). Copyright 2015 James Bond, 978-1-491-90762-7.”
If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at [email protected].
Safari Books Online is an on-demand digital library that delivers expert content in both book and video form from the world’s leading authors in technology and business.
Technology professionals, software developers, web designers, and business and creative professionals use Safari Books Online as their primary resource for research, problem solving, learning, and certification training.
Safari Books Online offers a range of plans and pricing for enterprise, government, education, and individuals.
Members have access to thousands of books, training videos, and prepublication manuscripts in one fully searchable database from publishers like O’Reilly Media, Prentice Hall Professional, Addison-Wesley Professional, Microsoft Press, Sams, Que, Peachpit Press, Focal Press, Cisco Press, John Wiley & Sons, Syngress, Morgan Kaufmann, IBM Redbooks, Packt, Adobe Press, FT Press, Apress, Manning, New Riders, McGraw-Hill, Jones & Bartlett, Course Technology, and hundreds more. For more information about Safari Books Online, please visit us online.
Please address comments and questions concerning this book to the publisher:
We have a web page for this book, where we list errata, examples, and any additional information. You can access this page at http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920034124.do.
To comment or ask technical questions about this book, send email to [email protected].
For more information about our books, courses, conferences, and news, see our website at http://www.oreilly.com.
Find us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/oreilly
Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/oreillymedia
Watch us on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/oreillymedia
18.216.4.79