Here are some important Key Ingredients for Building an Internal Cloud:
1.Shared Infrastructure. IT needs to understand how to configure the underlying storage and networking so that when it is brought together it can be shared across all of the enterprise’s different workloads. They also need to determine where in that shared infrastructure they should delineate between different users on that infrastructure. And also they need to fully understand their current infrastructure in order to re-use some of tis capabilities. Some keys area to consider like DB or Queue provision on their infrastructure.
2.Self-Service Automated Portal. It is essential to make sure that the compute cloud can be consumed in an easy form by both developers and IT professionals. There is a need for self- service capabilities, and for highly automated provisioning portals that provide the ability to add workloads without having to go through all of the many different steps of provisioning with the network and underlying storage.
3.Scalable. An effective cloud solution has to be scalable. IT organizations should think about boundary conditions in a more creative way, instead using the traditional models of scalability. As a new workload request comes up, they must determine where to provision that specific workload.
4.Rich Application Container. Clouds need to have a richer application container that will show the different interdependencies between components of the application, specifically those that take place between different virtual machines. This information help create the correct network subnets so that the storage will work well together and not be isolated from one another.
5.Programmatic Control. It is very common for a compute cloud to have programmatic control. Some of the more popular compute clouds on the market today have made good use of an API called REST. REST is a very simple HTTP- based protocol that provides the ability to manipulate stateful objects in a clear way. It's better to have organization which have Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which provided you interoperability and easy to use services, and provide re-use and loose coupling between different applications within an enterprise.
6.100% Virtual Hardware Abstraction. Clouds need 100% hardware abstraction. This can include servers or other physical devices like storage. In a cloud environment, the user should be able to interact with the virtual machines and other devices through the user interface, verses actually changing physical infrastructure.
7.Strong Multi-Tenancy. Strong multi-tenancy involves extensive use of VLANs to isolate network traffic between different zones in the cloud. This is obviously critical in an external cloud, but also a common requirement in internal clouds, to make sure that authorized users have access to certain applications.
8.Chargeback. This may not be 100 % true when you are building internal cloud within organization, but its to have this practice as IT organizations must be able to create effective and accurate chargeback capabilities. For internal clouds, even if funds aren’t literally exchanged,, the ability to create transparency in costs and services can help justify expenses.
