The standard definition of cloud computing is a “paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of sharable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on demand” (ISO/IEC 17788). This paradigm enables organizations to shift from traditional, capacity-driven operational models to lean, demand-driven operational models. This work adapts lean manufacturing principles across the cloud service delivery chain to achieve the lean cloud computing goal of sustainably achieving the shortest lead time, best quality, and highest customer delight at the lowest cost.
Traditionally, ICT systems were configured with sufficient capacity to serve the forecast demand, plus a safety margin, for the upcoming months, quarters, or perhaps even years. After configuring application and resource capacity to serve that forecast demand, further changes to the configuration were often discouraged to reduce the risk of procedural errors or expositing residual software or documentation defects which might impact production traffic. Thus, significant excess resource and application capacity were often committed that would rarely or never be used, thereby wasting both capital and operating expense. Lean computing pivots from the traditional build-for-peak, supply-oriented operating model to a just-in-time, demand-driven operating model. Lean cloud computing enables sustainable efficiency improvements that are essential when offering service into a competitive and cost-sensitive market.
This work considers lean cloud computing via three interlocking threads of analysis:
Methodically applying lean (i.e., Toyota production system) thinking to the cloud service delivery chain, especially regarding rapid elasticity and scaling. This is the focus of Chapter 3: Lean Thinking on Cloud Capacity Management, Chapter 4: Lean Cloud Capacity Management Strategy, Chapter 7: Lean Demand Management, Chapter 8: Lean Reserves, and Chapter 10: Lean Cloud Capacity Management Performance Indicators.
This work considers business, architectural, and operational aspects of efficiently delivering valuable services to end users via cloud-based applications hosted on shared cloud infrastructure and focuses on overall optimization of the service delivery chain to enable both application service provider and infrastructure service provider organizations to adopt leaner, demand-driven operations to serve end users more efficiently. Explicitly considering the service delivery challenges of both the cloud service customer organizations that operate applications running on cloud infrastructure—as well as the challenges of cloud infrastructure service provider organizations that operate shared cloud resources—offers perspective and insight to enable optimizations across the entire service delivery chain to benefit cloud service providers, cloud service customers and cloud service users. The work is targeted at readers with business, operational, architectural, development, or quality backgrounds in the ICT industry to help them achieve the shortest lead time, best quality and value, and highest customer delight at the lowest cost for their service offerings. The work does not consider lean or agile development, software-defined networking (SDN), facility planning, or tradeoffs of any particular implementation technology (e.g., virtualization hypervisors versus Linux containers).
This book is structured as follows:
Application capacity management – how much application capacity should be online and available to service user demand at any point in time?
This chapter also frames the cloud computing service delivery chain that will be analyzed in Chapter 3: Lean Thinking on Cloud Capacity Management and in the remainder of the book.
Cross-references are included throughout the text to help readers follow analysis through to insights and recommendations. An Index, Abbreviations, and References are also included.