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Cisco's integration of OpenShift 1.0 (by Red Hat) and the Cisco Prime Service Catalog (PSC) creates a solution to provision, configure, and manage Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and other IT services all through a single pane-of-glass. The combined solution provides a unified portal and service catalog for XaaS (anything-as-a-Service).
The benefits of OpenShift and Cisco Prime extend far beyond the integrated portal/service catalog. All IT services can be managed through the Cisco PSC. When the user signs onto Cisco PSC, he or she can provision, configure, and manage all services in the service catalog without switching between management systems and without signing into each system individually.
The Cisco PSC abstracts the interface to the individual management domains. The user completes the provisioning, configuration, and management of services through Cisco PSC, providing the user with the same interface and the same experience for all of the IT services.
Provisioning of PaaS services through the Cisco PSC is a one-step process done through a menu-driven GUI instead of an arcane command line interface. The Cisco PSC assigns and provisions the IaaS resources when the PaaS service is provisioned. After the IaaS resource exhaustion threshold limit is reached, additional resources are seamlessly added, allowing the solution to scale out without operator intervention.
The Cisco PSC with OpenShift leverages all of the existing strengths of Cisco Prime products in managing IaaS for supporting legacy applications while providing one-touch configuration for PaaS.
For the user, Cisco PSC provides:
IaaS services from the Cisco PSC support the migration of legacy applications to the cloud, gaining control of application management, and at the same time reducing server sprawl and costs.
PaaS services from OpenShift provide the ideal set of tools for rapid application development and deployment in the cloud.
Together, the integrated solution solves the most pressing problems facing IT departments today.
IaaS has led the way for IT organizations to begin the process of migrating applications from individual servers to the cloud. IaaS has been effective in centralizing servers, reducing costs, and controlling server sprawl.
With the success of IaaS, IT departments are under great pressure with the business demand for greater access to larger amounts of information increasing geometrically. The pressure to reduce the growth in IT budgets is also increasing. Meeting the geometric increases in demands requires better tools than today's linear development environment can provide. Figure 1-1 shows PaaS service layers.
Figure 1-1 Service Layers: PaaS Perspective
To understand the benefits of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) as part of a cloud infrastructure, it is necessary to understand how PaaS fits into the cloud stack. As emphasized in Figure 1-1, most cloud services are delivered through IaaS, SaaS, or PaaS.
Each of these layers offers a different degree of automation, and value, in the cloud stack. For IaaS, the consumer of the service takes on all of the management above the virtualization of the hardware. The service consumer installs the operating system, the applications, and is responsible for any dependencies for the O/S or application, and any middleware required.
At the opposite end of the stack, SaaS offers the service consumer the lowest management burden, but also the least flexibility. The application is an out-of-the-box commodity, with the service consumer having little to no opportunity to customize. While this works well for standardized applications, most businesses require some level of customization.
PaaS targets the cloud consumers that need the flexibility to configure and develop applications, but removes the burden of managing the lower layer components of the stack. The platform management tasks are part of the platform, freeing developers and administrators to focus on the design and delivery of the application.
While PaaS resides between the IaaS layer and the SaaS layer, the service consumer views PaaS-developed services as just more consumable services. PaaS functions delivered through the Cisco PSC allows end users to order complete application or platform stacks from the Cisco self-service portal. The application blueprint provides end users the ability to order fully configured, multi-tiered cloud applications using standards and automation. This approach bridges the gap between developers and operations and facilitates the collaborative deployment process needed to achieve the goals of DevOps.
More than a development environment, PaaS combines the capabilities of the platform at multiple layers to enable services such as auto-scaling and load balancing, relieving the developer of recreating the platform services for each application.
The PaaS layer empowers the developer with a rich set of tools, leveraging the most important benefits cloud technology offers.
Some of the benefits PaaS provides include:
The benefits PaaS provides are rapidly driving PaaS growth. Without PaaS, many of the services enterprises require at the SaaS level will exceed the limited capacity of the IT resources and budget.
Cisco Prime products address the complete experience lifecycle from service design through fulfillment, assurance, analysis, and optimization. The Cisco Prime product architecture is a pre-integrated management application suite, incorporating a self-populating common inventory model, based on industry standards. The data model for Cisco Prime products abstracts network devices and services to provide powerful experience management capabilities and extends coverage from the service provider core network to the customer premises.
The Cisco Prime product architecture provides a comprehensive management solution to automate the design, fulfillment, assurance, and ongoing management of advanced network services such as video, mobility, and managed cloud services over IP networks. It enables repeatable, policy-driven service provisioning processes within standardized work flows and templates, allowing support personnel without specialized networking knowledge to easily provision, modify, diagnose, and repair complex services. Ultimately, it helps service providers provision services more quickly and consistently, at a lower cost.
The Cisco Prime product architecture is also designed to address complex operational challenges such as pre-population of end-to-end inventory in management systems and cross-domain fault management and troubleshooting. It provides a unified, consistent, and end-to-end view of network services, as well as cohesive work flows for common tasks that extend across multiple domains. As a result, service providers can diagnose, and correct, faults that span multiple domains more rapidly.
Finally, the Cisco Prime product architecture allows service providers to deliver the highly reliable, uninterrupted services their customers expect. Cisco Prime product solutions can be deployed to meet even the most demanding high-availability requirements. This includes both localized high-availability failover, as well as options for geographic disaster recovery and offloading.
The Cisco Prime product architecture delivers all of these benefits through a flexible, end-to-end framework of integrated Cisco Prime product suites, as shown in Figure 1-2.
Figure 1-2 Cisco Prime Product Architecture
The primary components of the Cisco Prime product architecture are described below.
The Cisco Prime abstraction layer interacts with OpenShift, reducing the complexity for the administrator and the end user, as shown in Figure 1-3.
Figure 1-3 Cisco PSC Abstracts Domain Specific Controllers
By abstracting the domain specific interactions from the user, Cisco PSC provides the same user experience for all services in the catalog. The user provisions IaaS, PaaS, and other IT services through the same pane of glass, with same graphical user interface.
The architecture of the Cisco PSC is focused on three main areas:
The integration for this document is focused primarily on the consumer storefront (Figure 1-4).
Figure 1-4 Cisco PSC Architecture
Through the Consumer Storefront, this document provides unparalleled ease-of-use to build and expose PaaS services, and to configure and manage IaaS services.
Together, OpenShift and the Cisco PSC create the market leading solution to satisfy IT departments' needs for IaaS for legacy applications, and PaaS to develop and maintain applications.