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HOW TO BUILD A CLOUD ARCHITECTURE THAT RESPONDS TO BUSINESS NEEDS

As Tesla CEO Elon Musk famously put it, ‘you can’t have people in the production line itself, otherwise you drop to people speed.’

If we want to work at the speed that private cloud can enable, we’ll need to remove as much human latency from our processes as possible.

Steps for self-service: Develop an API-centric architecture Limit user choices Avoid approval queues Develop an API-centric architecture In a self-service model, command-line interfaces and high-touch GUIs are the enemy. We don't want an engineer at a keyboard pushing buttons; we want machines talking to machines. Whether we're automating simple tasks or implementing a full continuous integration/continuous delivery toolchain, it's critical to have APIs that are as reliable as physical infrastructure. The best way to achieve this kind of integration is to deploy REST APIs. With a RESTful architecture we no longer manage devices; we simply push configurations. Eventually, this will enable us to "nuke and repave"—wipe the entire configuration of a data center and replace it with a single click. Using REST APIs also eliminates dependencies. If one application or service in our private cloud changes, it won't break any others. 2. Limit user choices Self-service models work best when they present users with a menu of discrete, pre-approved options. Just as Henry Ford offered the original Model T to customers in any color so long as it was black, we need to limit the choices we provide. By determining which features to expose, we also shield users from the complexity of the underlying technology, significantly reducing their learning curve. And because we're not exposing every feature of the underlying infrastructure, we can change elements of it transparently without disrupting the user experience. 3. Avoid approval queues Like death and taxes, the change review process is usually unavoidable. But we can minimize the time it takes by fully defining each process before presenting it for approval. Ideally, the choice will simply be whether to approve or deny a process without involving committees in defining what that process should look like. Otherwise we will end up spending months to roll out a single app just because we're waiting for approvals. It's the job of the cloud architect to understand the business requirements of a private cloud, define the security parameters, and decide what its high availability and resilience policies looks like. Even if it takes an army of engineers to design and build our cloud architecture, it should take far fewer to operate and maintain it. The more automation we introduce, the faster we'll be able to scale to keep up with demand for our applications, today and in the future.  

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