openstack-manuals/doc/arch-design/compute_focus/section_user_requirements_compute_focus.xml
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE section [
<!ENTITY % openstack SYSTEM "../../common/entities/openstack.ent">
%openstack;
]>
<section xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
version="5.0"
xml:id="user-requirements-compute-focus">
<?dbhtml stop-chunking?>
<title>User requirements</title>
<para>High utilization of CPU, RAM, or both defines compute
intensive workloads. User requirements determine the performance
demands for the cloud.
</para>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>Cost</term>
<listitem>
<para>Cost is not generally a primary concern for a
compute-focused cloud, however some organizations
might be concerned with cost avoidance. Repurposing
existing resources to tackle compute-intensive tasks
instead of acquiring additional resources may
offer cost reduction opportunities.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Time to market</term>
<listitem>
<para>Compute-focused clouds can deliver products more quickly,
for example by speeding up a company's software development
life cycle (SDLC) for building products and applications.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Revenue opportunity</term>
<listitem>
<para>Companies that want to build services or products that
rely on the power of compute resources benefit from a
compute-focused cloud. Examples include the analysis
of large data sets (via Hadoop or Cassandra) or
completing computational intensive tasks such as
rendering, scientific computation, or
simulations.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
<section xml:id="legal-requirements-compute-focus">
<title>Legal requirements</title>
<para>Many jurisdictions have legislative and regulatory
requirements governing the storage and management of data in
cloud environments. Common areas of regulation include:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>Data retention policies ensuring storage of
persistent data and records management to meet data
archival requirements.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Data ownership policies governing the possession and
responsibility for data.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Data sovereignty policies governing the storage of
data in foreign countries or otherwise separate
jurisdictions.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Data compliance: certain types of information need
to reside in certain locations due to regular issues and,
more importantly, cannot reside in other locations
for the same reason.</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<para>
Examples of such legal frameworks include the <link
xlink:href="http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/">data
protection framework</link> of the European Union and the
requirements of the <link
xlink:href="http://www.finra.org/Industry/Regulation/FINRARules/">Financial
Industry Regulatory Authority</link> in the United
States. Consult a local regulatory body for more
information.</para></section>
<section xml:id="technical-considerations-compute-focus-user">
<title>Technical considerations</title>
<para>The following are some technical requirements you must consider
in the architecture design:
</para>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>Performance</term>
<listitem>
<para>If a primary technical concern is to deliver high performance
capability, then a compute-focused design is an
obvious choice because it is specifically designed to
host compute-intensive workloads.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Workload persistence</term>
<listitem>
<para>Workloads can be either
short-lived or long-running. Short-lived workloads
can include continuous integration and continuous
deployment (CI-CD) jobs, which create large numbers of
compute instances simultaneously to
perform a set of compute-intensive tasks. The environment then
copies the results or artifacts from each instance into
long-term storage before destroying the instance.
Long-running workloads, like a Hadoop or
high-performance computing (HPC) cluster, typically
ingest large data sets, perform the computational work
on those data sets, then push the results into long-term
storage. When the computational work finishes, the instances
remain idle until they receive another job. Environments
for long-running workloads are often larger and more complex,
but you can offset the cost of building them by keeping them
active between jobs. Another example of long-running
workloads is legacy applications that are
persistent over time.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Storage</term>
<listitem>
<para>Workloads targeted for a compute-focused
OpenStack cloud generally do not require any
persistent block storage, although some uses of
Hadoop with HDFS may require persistent
block storage. A shared filesystem or object store
maintains the initial data sets and serves as the
destination for saving the computational results. By
avoiding the input-output (IO) overhead, you can significantly
enhance workload performance. Depending on
the size of the data sets, it may be necessary to
scale the object store or shared file system to match
the storage demand.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>User interface</term>
<listitem>
<para>Like any other cloud architecture, a
compute-focused OpenStack cloud requires an on-demand
and self-service user interface. End users must be
able to provision computing power, storage, networks,
and software simply and flexibly. This includes
scaling the infrastructure up to a substantial level
without disrupting host operations.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Security</term>
<listitem>
<para>Security is highly dependent
on business requirements. For example, a
computationally intense drug discovery application
has much higher security requirements
than a cloud for processing market
data for a retailer. As a general rule, the security
recommendations and guidelines provided in the
OpenStack Security Guide are applicable.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</section>
<section xml:id="operational-considerations-compute-focus-user">
<title>Operational considerations</title>
<para>From an operational perspective, a compute intensive cloud
is similar to a general-purpose cloud. See the general-purpose
design section for more details on operational requirements.</para>
</section>
</section>