"...customers are going to want to see an ecosystem of cloud computing services from multiple vendors that will allow them to dynamically allocate various jobs based on the capabilities and pricing offered by the cloud computing service. To accomplish that, IT organizations are going to have to deploy something that functions like a cloud computing broker at the edge of the enterprise."
http://www.ctoedge.com/content/enabling-ecosystems-cloud
This, of course, is exactly what the Vordel Cloud Service Broker provides. It mitigates against the differing proprietary interfaces provided by multiple Cloud providers. Once these proprietary interfaces are smoothed over by the Vordel Cloud Service Broker, this enables a number of exciting consequences. Mike Vizard mentions the usage of Amazon Spot Pricing as one of them.
Jonathan Kupferman has provided a good summary of the benefit of the Cloud Service Broker here:
With a plethora of cloud providers, each with a their own API/set of services/pricing model/etc it would be quite cumbersome for the end-user to programmatically access each service. Instead, the cloud broker creates the layer of abstraction between the user and providers so that the end users can see one cohesive view of all of the services. This way the customer doesn't have to worry about the nitty gritty like the different REST calls required to create a server, they just hit the launch button and a server appears on the desired cloud.
http://www.regexprn.com/2009/08/low-down-on-cloud-brokers.html
This allows the user of the Cloud Service Broker to deal with one interface, which represents a contract, and then the broker connect to the services on the client's behalf. As Chris Hoff puts it:
"In the case of the service broker, it’s their job to take these declarations of service definition (service contracts) and translate them across subscribing service providers who may each have their own proprietary interface."As well as brokering the connection to multiple Cloud-based services which have differing interfaces, the Cloud Service Broker also manages the API Keys which are used to authenticate to the services. The Cloud Service Broker also meter the connections so that there are no billing surprises, and in order to provide an independent audit trail. Another key advantage of the Cloud Service Broker is that it allows for Service Level Agreement information to be collected for Cloud Services, from the point of view of the client. Cloud Service Providers, famously, are often loath to provide such SLAs.
http://www.rationalsurvivability.com/blog/?p=1189
Sign up for an invitation to download the Vordel Cloud Service Broker here.
2 comments:
Potential cloud services brokers will need to consider the entire lifecycle of cloud delivery and management. Interconnection technologies provide the means to aggregate access to different clouds, but they'll also need to provide a means to unify provisioning, user authorization and access control, user/service administration, billing and support. Integrating individual components and tying them together with workflow rules becomes a huge challenge, which is why many service providers and increasingly enterprise IT organizations are using unified cloud services platforms from providers such as Jamcracker.
http://www.jamcracker.com
As well as the requirements you mention, there is also the requirement for laying down an audit trail which is independent of the info recorded by the cloud service providers themselves, and also to link authentication across cloud services, to provide effectively single sign-on for cloud services. These are all additional functions of a Cloud Service Broker.
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