Cloud Provisioning

Cloud provisioning is a process that facilitates deploying and managing of virtual machines of a company’s infrastructure. It is a selection of applications and services that will be housed in the public or private cloud. Provisioning helps the clients to re-architect their existing applications to the appropriate cloud to get additional benefits. Provisioning is done in different forms.

What are Virtual Machines?

Virtual machines are computers provisioned on third-party location. Unlike your desktop, virtual machines cannot be touched. These are the machines that have virtual existence but their cloud computing capability is tangible.

Cloud provisioning involves creating several such VMs over the existing cloud hosting model over which virtualization has not been achieved.

While provisioning cloud, you will model several such applications to enable you to remotely access resources at the place.

Types of Cloud Provisioning –

1. Advance provisioning – here the client and provider come to an agreement on the services and resources in advance at a flat monthly fee.

2. Dynamic provisioning – here the provider adds or removes resources as per requirements on the pay-as-you-use payment model.

3. Self-provisioning – The client creates a customer account and purchases his requirements paying through credit card.

Advantage of Cloud provisioning –

Cloud provisioning has several advantages –

- First, it makes resources remotely available. For companies with multiple offices, it is a boon to the business. A central resource system can be designed to provide computing capabilities to all the cloud endpoints. A central system is easier to manage and maintain than several discrete cloud hosting systems.

- Cloud provisioning reduces cost. Virtual machines are cheaper than their physical counterparts.

- Virtual machines manage resources better than a physical computer because the root privilege is available.

How to provision Clouds?

To provision clouds you need to –

- First establish a data center with all the requisite hardware. This is where you are likely to spend the most. Data centers won’t come easy. A single server can cost several thousand dollars. To top things by a tad bit, there are recurring power, maintenance and cooling charges. Unless you have extensive funds at place, you cannot setup a data center.

- Next, you need to pool all the resources of the data center at once place. The aim is to make a single giant pool from where necessary computing powers can be distributed as and when required.

- The next step is to achieve virtualization. This is where you are likely to do much brainstorming. Virtualization is accomplished by creating a central system and configuring it with the needed central and peripheral application software.

- It is recommended to have a front end API to make handling things more intuitive at user-end.