It's time for us to get into a discussion about the management plane.
The management plane is used by the most privileged users,
those who install and remove hardware, software, and firmware.
This plane is also the pathway for individual tenants who have
limited and controlled access to the cloud's resources.
The plane's primary interface is APIs, both toward the resources managed, as
well as towards the users. A graphical user interface,
a web page, is typically built on top of these APIs, and then these APIs
allow the automation of control tasks like scripting and orchestration
of setup of complex application architectures, and populating the
configuration management of those architectures. The provisioning and
role‑based access control, where a number of these roles actually
represent the granting of temporary access to platform and
infrastructure services,
assuming APIs is also another element of what is
on‑boarded inside of the management plane.
The cloud service provider will also provide KMS services that allow
the consumer to use client‑side keys from the provider, or remote keys
from the consumer's premises to the cloud.
All services provided have some level of shared responsibility
regarding the security and configuration capabilities, depending
on what the client is consuming.
For instance, IaaS, the client, is going to be more responsible in
that shared responsibility model for updating and patching things,
but up at SaaS, there will be less configuration capabilities and
updating capabilities.
The management console is, in fact, also a service catalog,
that is the fulfillment of the on‑demand element of the five
characteristics of cloud computing.
Finally,
the management plane also facilitates the conversion of resource‑pooled
assets into consumable workloads in a multi‑tenant environment. A
pictoral representation of the orchestration of these services from the
infrastructure would start with the pooling together of physical
resources that would include storage represented by physical
network‑attached storage and storage area network arrays, network
systems represented by routers, switches,
firewalls, and other network devices, and finally,
the physical compute systems that represent the consumption of
bytes and Hertz. Each of these major pools of resources would have
some management by controller technology.
This interfacing of these controllers with APIs in the
cloud‑management plane is how we connect the centrally
controlled spaces of resource pools in the cloud.
These controllers are combined into a single switching fabric
known as hyper‑converged infrastructure.
This promises to deliver simplicity and flexibility
when compared to legacy systems.
The integrated storage servers and network switches are
designed to be managed as a single system across all instances
of a hyper‑converged infrastructure.
Join me next as we consider some cloud computing risk.