Setting up the private cloud

After long time resisting the idea of starting the blog, here it is. So this will be about what we need to understand and know to design a cloud computing environment.

As with all things, we will start small and build up. The first thing is that I am going to use VMWare vSphere as underlying platform and see if I can use Eucalyptus on top of it.

How we will use this cloud (let's call it cumulus)?
Phase I will focus on providing development environment and automate provision for it. It will contain SQL servers, .NET environment, test machines etc.

Phase II will expand Phase I to provide cloud applications, application building blocks and complete solutions.

As the clouds consist of three main layers (SaaS - Software as a Service, PaaS - Platform as a Service and IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service) and as we already have IaaS pretty much in place (vSphere is well known concept), developer platform (PaaS) will be the second one to do. Idea is to create a pool of dynamically build and provisioned workstations and environments which will be delivered according to pre-defined SLAs and may include different machines from simple OS installation to multi-server based test environments.

To be able to do this dynamically and with a minimum management overhead, we will need customized management layer (http://eucalyptus.com) to create a subscription based service to which developers will subscribe and request resource. After the resource is not needed anymore, it will be destroyed or returned back to the pool. Sounds nice but let's see how we can do it?