CLOUD MANAGEMENT

Cloud management refers to the exercise of control over public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructure resources and services. A well-designed cloud management strategy can help IT pros control those dynamic and scalable computing environments.

Cloud management can also help organizations achieve three goals:

• Self-service refers to the flexibility achieved when IT pros access cloud resources, create new ones, monitor usage and cost, and adjust resource allocations.
• Workflow automation lets operations teams manage cloud instances without human intervention.
• Cloud analysis helps track cloud workloads and user experiences.

Without a competent IT staff in place, it's difficult for any cloud management strategy to succeed. These individuals must possess knowledge of the proper tools and best practices while they keep in mind the cloud management goals of the business.

Why is cloud management important?

Companies are more likely to improve cloud computing performance, reliability, cost containment and environmental sustainability when they adhere to tried-and-true cloud optimization practices.

There are many ways to approach cloud management, and they are ideally implemented in concert. Cost-monitoring tools can help IT shops navigate complex vendor pricing models. Applications run more efficiently when they use performance optimization tools and with architectures designed with proven methodologies. Many of these tools and strategies dovetail with environmentally sustainable architectural strategies to lower energy consumption. Cloud management decisions must ultimately hinge on individual corporate priorities and objectives, as there is no single approach.

Cloud management goals and characteristics

Arguably the biggest challenge to cloud management is cloud sprawl, which is exactly what it sounds like: IT staff loses track of cloud resources, which then multiply unchecked throughout the organization.Cloud sprawl can increase costs and create security and management problems, so IT shops need governance policies and role-based access controls in place.                                        

• Storage consumption refers to storage tied to the compute instances.
• Load-balancing services distribute incoming network traffic.
• Database instances help pool and analyze data.
• Cache instances use memory to hold frequently accessed data and thus avoid the need to use slower media, such as disk storage.
• Functions, also called server less computing services, are used to provision workloads and avoid the need to supply and pay for compute instances. The cloud provider operates the service that loads, executes and unloads the function when it meets trigger parameters.

Security management

The major public cloud vendors continue to invest in their services and improve cloud security, such as their ability to fend off distributed denial-of-service attacks. Some experts say that today's cloud attacks are far less devastating than on-premises ones because cloud attacks are generally limited to a single misconfigured service, whereas a local attack might devastate an entire infrastructure.

Nevertheless, IT shops must remain vigilant to guard against security threats. Google, AWS and Microsoft, among others, do not take full responsibility to keep cloud data safe. Cloud users must understand their shared responsibility in the cloud to protect their data. Cloud security best practices include configuration management, automated security updates on SaaS, and improved logging and access management. Cloud configurations today are more standard, and standard configurations are easier to secure.

Cloud security challenges

Cloud security breaches and incidents still occur even as security technologies improve and service providers gird their networks. People can attack network hosts and web apps as fast as they can be fortified. Cloud administrators should test their environments and have the latest security audits and reports. Take care when adopting new technologies, such as AI and machine learning, which use many data sources and therefore broaden the range for potential attacks

Cost management

Cloud computing costs can spiral if they are not managed from the start. Numerous short-term and long-term cost optimization strategies for cloud configurations can help keep budgets in line.

Start with choosing the right provider. There are different ways to run an application: hosted on VMs on a service, containerized, or hosted in a serverless computing environment. Each has varying cost and management complexity. The trick is to find the right balance between cost and enterprise needs. Apply the following considerations:

• Determine how much redundancy your application needs. One way to achieve cloud redundancy is to pick a hosting option that distributes workloads across multiple data centers within a region. This is a low-cost strategy but has the least amount of redundancy. Another way is for users to mirror workloads across more than one region, which offers more redundancy but at a higher cost.
• Determine the appropriate size and scale for your installation. Tools can help identify a more efficient --- meaning less expensive -- VM instance for the workload you want to run. Reserved instances cost less than on-demand VMs, though they must be booked in advance. Preemptible instances are cheapest but risk interruption by the cloud service provider, so they aren't a fit for consistent workloads that require uptime. Autoscaling, typically part of a cloud vendor's overall framework, can increase or decrease resources as demand shifts.
• Minimize data movement. Cloud providers charge for data egress. If you move data frequently, choose the appropriate cloud services setup for that. Also, recognize that moving data can increase security risks.
• Consider third-party tools. Third-party cost-management tools may offer better capabilities for management, monitoring and security than a cloud platform's native services. They also tend to work in multi-cloud environments.

Cloud automation

Cloud automation, sometimes referred to as orchestration, reduces the repetitive, manual work involved to manage cloud workloads. The main idea is to boost operational efficiencies, accelerate application deployment and reduce any human error that can bring down applications. To achieve this, IT pros need orchestration or automation tools

Software targets diffrent areas of cloud automation, from on-premises tools for private clouds to hosted services from the big cloud service providers, such as Microsoft Azure Automation and the automation feature in AWS Systems Manager.

Cloud automation challenges

Automation typically saves time and money, but a big challenge for enterprises is that users may feel automation will put them out of a job. In most cases, automation supplements a job and frees up the cloud pro to do other work.

Private cloud management tools

For private cloud management, enterprises typically use in-house tools. Applications that run in a private cloud don't get the advantage of unlimited elasticity gained from public cloud services built on an enormous scale of infrastructure. The IT team must be certain that it has adequate, available resources to run the app, and must carefully manage environments to ensure that no one app consumes too many corporate computing resources.

Some in-house tools can include platform-specific management software, such as Turbonomic Operations Manager (now owned by IBM) or Snow Commander. There are also private management tools with sophisticated software frameworks that manage complex hybrid cloud deployments, such as Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager for Hyper-V, VMware vCloud Suite and Citrix Cloud.

References : -   [1] https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/cloud-management-in-cloud-computing/

                          [2]https://www.sumologic.com/glossary/cloud-management/

Author - 1. Adarsh Dalvi 

              2. Rajesh Adam 

              3. Akash Patil 

             4. Pranav Chaudhari