Understanding the Impact of Multi-Tenancy Design Concepts
Today we hear from Chip Childers, product architect for SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services and partners with our product management and product engineering teams to drive the overall solution design of the service…CM
As you evaluate different cloud providers, it is important to understand the different concepts providers can use to deploy multi-tenancy. Different concepts facilitate—or limit—the way in which a provider can respond to changes in the service needs of clients.
General Purpose Clouds
For example, some vendors design their clouds as commodities. They focus on providing low cost access to computing power in homogenous environments. This type of general purpose cloud can scale quickly and easily to support large numbers of similar users. As they become saturated, however, you may begin to see variations in performance, as some users expand their usage and experience spikes that place constraints on all other uses.
Performance variations can affect computing power, storage and I/O or network traffic. Most providers already have solved performance problems associated with sharing VM RAM and CPU power, and most have deployed one or more of the many solutions for storage and I/O performance issues. Consequently, network performance is usually the first noticeable bottleneck. While it is important to know how your provider will handle performance variations wherever they appear, it is especially important to know how network issues will be handled.
The Concern: Network Latency
Networks experience varying levels of latency based on where the users and their data reside and how much bandwidth has been allocated each user. The easiest solution to network issues within a cloud is to physically separate heavy users from lighter users. This means moving the heavy user to a private cloud where resources can be adjusted to meet the requirements of peak periods, more users and new applications.
The Answer: Scalability and SLA
To reduce your risk of incurring more costs from your cloud provider, look for an enterprise provider that has scalability at every level of the cloud—SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. And look, too, for a provider offering a Service Level Agreement that addresses the performance requirements for the services most important to your business. These are the attributes of an enterprise level provider with the elasticity to meet your future needs.