How Clouds Hold IT Together: Integrating Architecture with Cloud Deployment

Gain the practical knowledge you need to plan, design, deploy, and manage mixed cloud and on-premises IT management systems. Drawing on his experience as senior principal software architect at CA Technologies, Marvin Waschke lays out the nuts and bolts of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)¯the 5-volume bible of standard IT service management practices that is the single most important tool for aligning IT services with business needs.

Many enterprise IT management applications, and the ways they are integrated, come directly from ITIL service management requirements. Types of integration include integrated reporting and dashboards, event-driven integration, device integration, and application data integration. Enterprise integration depends critically on high performance, scalability, and flexibility. Failure to integrate applications to service management requirements results in such wryly anticipated spectacles as the annual crash of the websites of Super Bowl advertisers such as Coca-Cola and Acura.

Waschke weighs in on the debate between those who advocate integrating "best-of-breed" applications and those who favor a pre-integrated set of applications from a single vendor. He also rates the strengths and weaknesses of the major architectural patterns—central relational databases, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and enterprise data buses—for IT integration of service management applications. He examines the modifications to traditional service management that are required by virtualized systems of datacenter management and application design.

Clouds present special problems for integration. How Clouds Hold IT Together details solutions for integration problems in private, community, and public clouds?especially problems with multi-tenant SaaS applications. Most enterprises are migrating to the cloud gradually rather than at one go. The transitional phase of mixed cloud and on-premises applications presents thorny problems for IT management. Waschke shows the reader how to normalize the performance and capacity measurements of concurrent traditional and cloud resources.

How Clouds Hold IT Together teaches software engineers, architects, product managers, and executives

• How to align service management architectures with service management principles

• How to deploy cloud architectures and managed services in an ITIL framework

• How to integrate cloud and on-premises architectures with balanced consideration of technical, security, compliance, and cost factors

About the Author

Marvin Waschke was a senior principal software architect at CA Technologies. His career has spanned the mainframe to the cloud. He has coded, designed, and managed the development of many systems, ranging through accounting, cell tower management, enterprise service desks, configuration management, and network management.

Waschke represented CA Technologies on the DMTF Cloud Management Working Group, DMTF Open Virtualization Format Working Group, DMTF Common Information Model REST Interface Working Group, OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee, DMTF Cloud Auditing Data Federation Working Group (observer), DMTF Configuration Database Federation Working Group, W3C Service Modeling Language Working Group, and OASIS OData Technical Committee (observer). On his retirement from CA, he was honored as a DMTF Fellow for his distinguished past and continuing significant contributions to the DMTF and continues his work with the DMTF on cloud standards. He was the editor-in-chief of the CA Technology Exchange (an online technical journal) and the author of Cloud Standards: Agreements That Hold Together Clouds.