Scalability and Manageability in the Cloud

We recently explained the differences between public, private and hybrid clouds. Once you have decided on which type of cloud works best for you, the next step is to look into how you will manage your deployment.

As we’ve mentioned previously, there are many layers of cloud computing, including cloud providers, development platforms, and cloud management. Progress has partnered with various organizations to acquire expertise in some of these levels.

For example Progress has partnered with RightScale for cloud management, which offers a fully automated management platform that delivers the scalable, cost-effective, on-demand power of cloud computing. RightScale also provides complete IT control and transparency when managing cloud environments.

So why do you need this extra layer of cloud management, instead of just doing it on your own? Here are some of the benefits that we see:

• Helps avoid cloud vendor lock in
• Supports both public and private clouds
• Provides added flexibility
• Allows for easy monitoring and management of an environment
• Provides automated scaling

Detailing this last point, a cloud management platform will help you determine when you need to scale up and scale back your cloud usage. For example, a retail point-of-sale application may need to scale up to additional capacity during holiday season, as well as have the ability to scale back once the rush is offer. A cloud management platform will not only allow you to quickly make those decisions, especially at times when the high traffic comes as a complete surprise, but will automatically scale based upon criteria defined by the business in order to ensure SLA’s are consistently met. Once the peak demand is over, it will also scale back down therefore saving costs, truly enabling elastic computing.

It was important for us to partner with RightScale so we can ensure our ISV partners have a cloud management layer they can count on.

In our next post we will talk about another cloud computing layer – the cloud provider – and one Progress partner that is helping our partners deploy in the cloud.