Generic Cloud Computing Framework Understanding and

Implementation

Emmanuel Kayode Akinshola Ogunshile

Department of Computer Science, University of the West of England, Bristol, U.K.

Keywords: VLAN – Virtual Local Area Network, IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service, SaaS – Software as a Service,

PaaS – Platform as a Service, CAD – Computer Aided Design, CRM – Customer Relationship Management,

vCPU – Virtual Central Processing Unit, COTS – Components of the Shelf.

Abstract: The rate of adoption of cloud services is increasing year on year as organisations realise the many benefits

that moving operations onto a cloud based platform provides. However, there is an argument to be made that

with the multitude services that offer cloud solutions in various forms, that choosing the right technology for

a business is not straight forward and cloud services may not always provide all the benefits suggested by the

service providers. Using the case study of OneDrum Ltd as a comparison of compatibility, an analysis of

current cloud providers as well as hardware that is used to provide cloud solutions is considered. With these

examples, potential solutions for the OneDrum Ltd scenarios have been devised with the aim to create

transferable solutions for other small manufacturing businesses.

1 INTRODUCTION

The numbers of cloud service types and providers has

increased rapidly as the technology has become more

widely understood and easier to deploy. This increase

in cloud solution providers and types of service

provides a new set of issues and potential confusions

for any small or medium sized business which is

trying to understand the potential benefits and risks of

moving any of their operations to a cloud solution.

Some of the key advantages as marketed by cloud

providers are ideas such as increased flexibility,

reduced running costs, reduced capital expenditure

and automated software updates (Rackspace, 2014).

These however, may not be applicable for all business

cases depending on a particular businesses

requirements therefore further consideration is

required to assess a business’s suitability to cloud

based infrastructures and which solution is most

beneficial to the individual business.

This paper therefore intends to outline the

OneDrum Ltd business case study and summarise

some of the current solutions that are available for the

business as well as the solutions suitability to that

businesses requirements. This will also include an

overview of the available hardware which underpins

these services. From this analysis, multiple cloud

solution will be designed and justified using the

requirements to try and create a solution that would

help facilitate the goals the business has for moving

operations to cloud based infrastructure.

2 BUSINESS SCENARIO

OneDrum Ltd is a small business based in Reading

that produce drum kits and accessories. The business

has three distinct departments: Administration,

Design and Manufacturing (See Figure 1). The

business currently has a 10Gbps Ethernet network

connection to which it has dedicated VLANs for each

department. Further to this, the company has two HP

ProLiant ML110s, one of which is used as a

webserver and the other which is used as a storage,

database and domain controller server. The company

mainly shares data through shared drives on the

storage server and backups are done via tape drives

within the servers. In terms of daily operations, all

employees have their own desktop computer which

has all of their required software, such as Microsoft

Office, installed locally.

OneDrum Ltd is looking to expand its online

ecommerce presence due to a recent increase in

demand for their products and their intended focus to

expand internationally. They have recently had issues

with their webserver crashing due to increased user

206

Ogunshile, E.

Generic Cloud Computing Framework Understanding and Implementation.

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2016) - Volume 1, pages 206-215

ISBN: 978-989-758-182-3

Figure 1: Distinct Departments of OneDrum Ltd.

traffic on their website which the HP ProLiant

ML110 was not equipped to handle. Further to this

also had an incident with loss of customer data due to

a hard drive failure and the tape backups only being

run once a day and the day’s sales and communication

was lost. The CEO of OneDrum Ltd is also

increasingly concerned with the free use of shard

drives on the network to send files as these are not

properly secured with the appropriate credentials and

this has resulted in some employees seeing data that

they are not supposed to have access to.

OneDrum Ltd need a solution that will cater to

their backup and security needs as well as help them

to expand easily when it comes to online orders and

international sales in terms of storage, compute and

network requirements.

3 CLOUD SERVICE TYPES

One of the main issues with comparing different

cloud providers is that they do not often use the same

metrics to describe what they offer even when

offering similar services. This can be due to reasons

such as not disclosing the hardware resources that are

being used by each provider, therefore two providers

may offer the same service but performance may vary

greatly. It is therefore hard to analyse the pros and

cons of one service over another. There have been

some attempts to create standards in this respect but

none have become universal as of writing.

Therefore, in order to successfully discuss and

design a cloud solution for OneDrum Ltd, discussion

of the various different types of Cloud Solutions and

how they could be used within OneDrum Ltd will be

undertaken to decide which would be best suited to

the businesses requirements. These cloud solutions

are often split into 3 main groups: Infrastructure as a

Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and

Software as a Service (SaaS) (IBM, 2015).

3.1 IaaS

IaaS gives the service consumer the most control as

this type of solution most closely resembles that of a

traditional on-premises datacentre. The cloud

provider provides the consumer with ability to

provision compute power, storage and networks

while managing the underlying cloud infrastructure

itself. The consumer has control in terms of operating

systems, storage, applications and to a limited degree

networking components (Michael J. Kavis, 2014).

The advantage to the service consumer is that it

removes the level of hardware management that is

required, simplifying the process of procuring more

compute performance, storage or network bandwidth.

This management is replaced with web based

management consoles and can also give the ability to

automate certain standard deployment procedures

(Michael J. Kavis, 2014). This also means that the

speed at which the infrastructure is deployed is much

quicker allowing for a much greater degree of

flexibility for a business.

Generic Cloud Computing Framework Understanding and Implementation

207

3.2 IaaS within OneDrum Ltd

OneDrum Ltd could use this type of cloud service to

migrate its physical servers to an IaaS provider,

allowing OneDrum Ltd to adapt quickly to any

potential new requirements in terms of compute

performance, storage or network throughput that

expanding their online e-commerce business and

expanding internationally could result in. This would

however mean that management of the servers would

still be the responsibility of OneDrum Ltd It

Administrators. OneDrum Ltd are also having issues

with keeping data backed up regularly, which would

be solved using an IaaS solution as it would then be

the responsibility of the service provider to ensure the

data is safe should hardware fail. However depending

on service, the IaaS solution may mean that OneDrum

Ltd is susceptible to any outages on the part of the

service provider or network infrastructure issues may

result in the inability to connect and manage

OneDrum Ltd’s servers.

3.3 PaaS

PaaS involves the delivery of a computing platform

such that it often involves the delivery of web

applications without the need to configure the

underlying hardware and software that would

normally be required (Michael J. Kavis, 2014). There

are two forms of PaaS, which are public and private

variations. Public PaaS involves a consumer uses

applications that are hosted on a public cloud via a

provider where the consumer has access to software

deployment and some configuration settings (David

Linthicum, 2013). Private PaaS involves the use of

private datacentres that are managed by consumer IT

departments (David Linthicum, 2013). The public

PaaS takes away some of the requirement to

configure underlying infrastructure for applications

to run, this includes networks, servers, storage or

operating systems but allows the consumer to have

control over the application and possibly settings for

the application environment. One main issue with this

is that the developers deploying software services

provided by a PaaS vendor are sometimes limited to

the tools and programming languages they can use as

well as not having much control over memory

allocation or other hardware functionality (Michael J.

Kavis, 2014).

3.4 PaaS with OneDrum Ltd

PaaS is not suited for use with OneDrum Ltd as none

of the requirements outlined in the scenario require the

development of customised web based applications.

3.5 SaaS

SaaS involves delivering the entire application as a

service to the consumer and the entirety of the

infrastructure behind that is handled by the service

provider and only the users and any specific

application configuration is handled by the user

(Michael J. Kavis, 2014).

SaaS can be advantageous to smaller companies

as they do not have to configure any of the application

infrastructure or provide support and maintenance

therefore no staff are required for this role. These

solutions are usually paid for via a subscription fee

and the software has the advantage of being updated

regularly with the ability to add new features and have

them deployed quickly (Naresh Kumar, 2012). One

of the disadvantages is that the user may be locked

into the use of that software without any easy option

to migrate should the companies situation change as

the company does not actually own the software they

are using (Naresh Kumar, 2012). Further to this like

all cloud solutions SaaS requires a connection to the

internet for full functionality therefore, should the

company have network issues, it could overall be

costly over an offline equivalent piece of software.

3.6 SaaS with OneDrum Ltd

OneDrum Ltd Administration department can use

SaaS software such as CRM management tools to

track stock and sales on their website as well as the

potential use of SaaS office suites which would

potentially reduce the cost of new hires and providing

them with software licenses. Further to the Design

department of OneDrum Ltd could potentially use

SaaS based CAD software to facilitate the designing

of new products and potentially reducing the cost of

expensive Workstation hardware, these SaaS CAD

solutions often allow a more collaborative design

approach which could potentially allow the designers

to work more closely together and further allowing

for remote work Rene (Millman, 2012). As to using

the SaaS, this does rely on the particular service being

reliable in terms of access with minimal downtime.

Further the network infrastructure of OneDrum Ltd

requires a stable internet connection as latency could

be an issue especially with CAD software. Further to

this if OneDrum Ltd decide to change vendor, the

process of migration may not be straightforward. A

further consideration is the security issue when

handling customer data offsite and storing the

businesses potentially sensitive data somewhere that

CLOSER 2016 - 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science

208

is not fully under your control.

4 CLOUD SERVICE

COMPARISON

This section is an overview and a comparison of

popular cloud service providers given the OneDrum

Ltd case study and assuming that both current

hardware servers would be directly replaced by IaaS

solutions. They will be compared in terms of the

services most prominent features as well as the

pricing model they adopt. Using the OneDrum Ltd

case study an analysis will then be made in terms of

which IaaS service would be cheapest and whether

this would be the deciding factor as to whether

OneDrum Ltd would adopt this service.

4.1 Amazon AWS

The Amazon AWS offers both IaaS and PaaS services

and overall has some of the lowest prices in the

market. It is also in the forefront in terms of

innovation when it comes to cloud infrastructure

providers (Dan Sullivan 2014).

Table 1 is a summary of the key capabilities and

costs of Amazon AWS solution (Script Rock, 2015).

Table 1: Capabilities and costs of Amazon AWS solution.

Low-end

1core/1gb

High-end

16core/117gb

Pricing

$0.013 - $4.6/hr

Bandwidth

15GB incl.

Network Out

Unavailable

4.2 Google Compute Engine

Google has a vast infrastructure backing this service

up and has integration between many of its services

including Google Cloud SQL which could potentially

be adopted by OneDrum Ltd as a replacement for their

current physical database server (Dan Sullivan 2014).

Table 2 is a summary of the key capabilities and

costs of Google Compute Engine solution (Script

Rock, 2015).

Table 2: Capabilities and costs of Google Compute Engine

solution.

Low-end

1 core/.6gb

High-end

16core/104gb

Pricing

$.012 -$1.184/hr

Bandwidth

$0.01/GB

Network Out

Unavailable

4.3 Rackspace Open Cloud

Rackspace offers both IaaS and SaaS services, both

of which could potentially be adopted by OneDrum

Ltd. All of Rackspace’s servers run using Solid-State

Drives meaning that performance is a key factor to

this solution. It is also known for its support and

customer service which could be key to a small

business moving their infrastructure and vital business

systems to a cloud service (Dan Sullivan 2014).

Table 3 is a summary of the key capabilities and

costs of Rackspace’s solution (Script Rock, 2015).

Table 3: Capabilities and costs of Rackspace solution.

Low-end

1core/1gb

High-end

32core/120gb

Pricing

$.052 - $6.24/hr*

Bandwidth

$0.10/GB

Network Out

200MB-10GB

4.4 Summary Table and Comparison

The above tables’ give examples where some cloud

providers do not reveal all of their performance

values as in the above case both Google and Amazon

do not indicate clear values for Network Output.

When comparing the above pricing models it shows

that Google’s Compute Engine is cheaper for its

lowest level of service however Amazon gives a large

Bandwidth allowance away free, which overall makes

it the cheaper service of the three cloud providers for

IaaS.

Table 4 is a summary of the costs of each platform

assuming the following conditions for OneDrum Ltd:

Two servers running using the least compute power

available and the most compute power available from

each service.

Table 4: Summary of the costs of each platform.

Google Rackspace Amazon

Two Server

with

minimum

compute

power

available

$0.44 per

day with

15GB

throughput

$2.75 per

day with

15GB

throughput

$0.31 per

day with

15GB

throughput

Two Server

with

maximum

compute

power

available

$28.57 per

day with

15GB

throughput

$151.26 per

day with

15GB

throughput

$110.40 per

day with

15GB

throughput

Using Table 4 it is clear that the Amazon service

Generic Cloud Computing Framework Understanding and Implementation

209

is the cheapest per day assuming a lower level of

computation is required. However when it comes to

requiring a higher compute performance Google’s

service would be a lot cheaper per day for OneDrum

Ltd. It would therefore be wise to consider whether

OneDrum Ltd is likely to require such a high level of

compute performance and if so Google service might

be more advantageous.

5 HARDWARE EXAMPLES AND

COST COMPARISON FOR

CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

In this section there will be an overview and

comparison of the hardware that underpins cloud

solutions. Typically cloud datacentres fundamentally

include the following hardware: Storage arrays, Rack

and Blade servers, networking appliances. This

makes up the necessary equipment to provide IaaS,

PaaS and SaaS.

5.1 Storage Arrays

These are typically arrays of hard drives that are

either traditional spinning hard drives or SSDs

depending on the requirements for performance

(Vangie Beal 2015). SSD are used where quick

response time is required such as in processes that

require a lot of data to be read from or written to the

disk quickly whereas spinning drives read and write

data slower and are suited to less demanding

processes. These storage arrays can be in the form of

Storage Area Networks (SANs) which are essentially

arrays of disks that usually have a central hardware

controller managing where data is written and read

from. Some datacentres use Software-defined storage

which means that the management of data is

controlled by software rather than hardware and

therefore, enterprises can use different vendors and

types of storage hardware without the normal issues

of poor interoperability (Mary Branscombe, 2015).

Table 5 is a summary of initial investment should

a storage array be required for OneDrum Ltd.

Table 5: OneDrum initial investment with strorage array.

Dell

MD3620F

P2000

FUJITSU

ETERNUS

ETDX602

Cost of

Storage

solution

£7,495 £7772 £6214

5.2 Rack and Blade Servers

Rack servers that are mounted in rack configurations

within datacentres and are typically hosts for virtual

machines (VMs) within the context of cloud

datacentres. These appliances can often be used to

host multiple VMs and services. Blade servers are

more modular and typically are dedicated to only

providing a single dedicated application such as a

webserver. They typically take up less room that a

rack server and use less power.

Table 6 is a summary of initial investment should

a rack server be required for OneDrum Ltd.

Table 6: OneDrum initial investment with rack server.

Dell

PowerEdg

e - R220

ProLiant

DL160

Lenovo

ThinkServer

RD440

Cost of

rack

server

£893 £981 £936

5.3 Networking Hardware

Networking hardware is vital in terms of

interconnecting all the resources within a cloud

datacentre. There are high requirements in terms of

networking scalability as well as bandwidth in order

to provide the service that the cloud service consumer

expects. These are also vital in terms of managing

security of the cloud network, ensuring that only the

traffic with the correct permission has access to the

correct resources. These appliances are often

connected via Fibre-Channel networking cards which

provide higher bandwidth than traditional copper

wire due to the higher throughput of data that can be

achieved using fibre optics (Manek Dubash, 2011).

6 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

DEFINITION

6.1 Project Purpose

Analyse and suggest potential use cases for the

adoption of cloud solutions to identify whether viable

for OneDrum Ltd to use for international and e-

commerce based expansion requirements in terms of

cost and security and ease of adaptability.

6.2 Stakeholders

These are the people that would be directly affected

CLOSER 2016 - 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science

210

should an implementation of a cloud solution be

undertaken. Their roles and needs, need to be

analysed and understood in order to design a solution

that meets OneDrum Ltd’s requirements.

6.2.1 Finance Officers

The two finance officers are responsible for

accounting for all sales and financial planning

including record keeping for all transactions. This

role involves communication with manufacturing

department in order to fulfil orders as well as the

database server to manage customer orders.

OneDrum Ltd’s financial officer currently uses a

CRM tool to administer this task. This software is

dependent on a backend server which is installed on

the Database server.

6.2.2 IT Administrators

The two IT administrators who currently administer

the company’s two servers, including patches,

backups, maintenance and upgrades. They also

maintain company internal network, webserver and

security including access control and individual

employee PCs.

6.2.3 Marketing Managers

Marketing mangers regularly update the company’s

website to include latest products and promotions and

they also create documentation in and around the

products and therefore require good communication

with the design team in order to fully understand the

products they sell. They use locally installed versions

of website design and creation tools and company

email.

6.2.4 Human Relations Officer

The Human Relations officer has access to the payroll

system and regularly is required to facilitate

communications between departments. Her current

tools include locally installed payroll software and

email hosted on the company’s webserver.

6.2.5 CEO and Vince CEO

Manage direction of the company so require close

communication with all areas of the company but

especially design and manufacturing. They mainly

use locally installed Office productivity tools as well

as company email.

6.2.6 Manufacturing Team

Manufacturing Team have workstations dedicated to

computer aided manufacturing machines as well and

computers to aid communication with design team.

They use custom software tools for the machinery as

well as company email for communication to process

orders.

6.2.7 Design Team

The design team use workstations dedicated to CAD

software that facilitate designing new products. They

require direct communication with manufacturing

team as well as with the CEO and Vice CEO.

6.3 Project Assumptions

These are the assumption being made prior to the

analysis of the company and any suggested solutions

consider these.

1. Budget is agreed is to be a maximum of

$16,000 in the first year.

2. Cost analysis is dependent on current cloud

service costs as of writing this document.

3. Transfer to new system may require staff

retraining.

May take unknown amount of time to migrate old

infrastructure to new cloud based infrastructure.

6.4 Constraints

These are the non-functional requirements of the

project that any solution put forward must adhere to.

1. Budget is $16,000 per year.

2. Customer and financial data security must be

ensured to legal requirement.

3. Cloud service must be accessible 99.5% of the

time with minimal downtime and disruption.

4. Data recovery must be ensured should there be

a datacentre failure.

Cloud solution must be scalable to adapt to increased

traffic on website and orders.

6.5 Functional Requirements

Functional requirements define how the solution

should behave.

1. Company departments should only be

accessible to those with the correct privileges.

2. Transactions should be traceable to analyse

resource usage.

Generic Cloud Computing Framework Understanding and Implementation

211

3. New cloud infrastructure must allow for

communication with existing infrastructure if

required.

Solution must be compatible with current desktop

environment.

7 ARCHITECTURE DEFINITION

The following section intends to outline three

potential solutions for OneDrum Ltd to adopt cloud

infrastructures and services. These solutions intend to

look at both the use of both currently available cloud

solutions as well as development of a custom cloud

solution.

7.1 Solution 1 – IaaS and SaaS

This solution involves using both IaaS and SaaS in

order to fulfil the business functionality. IaaS would

be used to fulfil the functionality of the webserver and

database that is currently setup on the two HP Proliant

ML100s. The webserver would be managed by the

current IT staff and be accessible in terms of content

uploading and updating by the marketing department

this would connect to an IaaS database for storing

both orders and website assets and business

documents. A CRM SaaS would be linked to the

webserver in order to control and track any orders for

the finance team and also the manufacturing team for

production information, this can then be updated once

orders have been fulfilled by manufacturing.

Further to this payroll would be migrated to a

cloud based SaaS solution as well as CAD for the

design time and all business office tools.

The purpose of this solution would be to negate

any local data loses and also allow easier expansion

should OneDrum Ltd take on new employees.

Moving the majority of business functions over to the

cloud would provide OneDrum Ltd with a greater

degree of flexibility, should any changes to the

business require quick expansion.

One of the major downsides to this solution is the

added initial cost of both the migration of the server

to IaaS as well as the use of SaaS immediately. There

would also be an element of retraining for the staff to

use the new implementation which could initially

cause some slowdown in business processes.

7.2 Solution 2 – IaaS Only

Similar to Solution 1, this solution uses IaaS for both

the webserver, database and file storage. The

webserver would be managed by the current IT staff

and be accessible in terms of content uploading and

updating by the marketing department. The

webserver would connect to an IaaS database for

storing both orders and website assets. The main

differences is that OneDrum would keep all their

current locally installed CRM, Payroll, CAD and

Office applications. The main purpose of this solution

would be to reduce the initial costs of retraining and

potential downtime that would be caused by

transferring all services over to the cloud. This would

however mean an onsite server would need to be

maintained or replaced for local storage backups.

7.3 Solution 3 – Private Cloud Solution

A private cloud solution would involve providing the

storage, servers and networking equipment required

to create a private cloud service that would operate as

both IaaS and PaaS similar to how the Solution 1 is

outlined. Using the storage servers as outline in

section ‘V’ of this paper as an idea of the potential

solutions the HP SAN was selected due to its better

specification for a similar cost such as the inclusion

of fibre channel networking. Further to this the HP

Rack server was chosen in order to ensure better

compatibility between two bits of hardware. Finally

in terms of networking a fibre channel network was

chosen due to the performance due to fibre channel

connections as well as expandability should further

bandwidth be required.

Providing this custom cloud solution allows a

higher level of security and control over the resources

compared to other public cloud solutions. This

solution also means that hardware can be selected to

the consumer’s specification as compared to other

cloud solutions which often do not disclose the

hardware specifications of their cloud services.

8 SYSTEM ANALYSIS

8.1 Cost Comparison

The cost of solution 3 is by far the most costly as it

involves investment in hardware infrastructure in

order to create private cloud. This solution is within

the budget of OneDrum Ltd however may not be

necessary to such a scale, it would depend on the

CEO’s priorities regarding security when comparing

it to using shared resources on other cloud providers

solutions.

When comparing the cost of Solution 1 and

Solution 2, Solution 1 may cost more overall as it

CLOSER 2016 - 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science

212

requires more downtime in terms of training and

server and application migration. However the

benefits of this long term are a reduction in

maintenance costs due to lack of individual staff

members pc configurations and updates which may

cause unexpected downtime.

This overall result in Solution 2 having the lowest

cost over the course of the first year of deployment

however this is at the potential cost of increased

maintenance of the local machines at OneDrum Ltd.

8.2 Latency Modelling

Table 7 compares the estimates of latency when using

each solution from input to result of updating the

webserver database with new content to be used on

the OneDrum Ltd website.

Table 7: Estimates of latency from proposed solutions.

Outbound Inbound Total

Solution 1 25ms 10ms 35ms

Solution 2 25ms 10ms 35ms

Solution 3 5ms 5ms 10ms

As demonstrated by Table 7, latency is least when

running a private cloud solution as the location of the

data centre can be much nearer to business operations

even though the same data transfer is done when

compared to Solution 1. When comparing Solution 1

and 2 however there is little to no difference as

essentially the latency is determined by the

connection from OneDrum Ltd to the datacentre

which is the same in both instances.

8.3 Requirement Analysis

It is reasonable with certain large solutions

architecture projects that use COTS that requirements

may need to be adapted as cannot be otherwise met

fully. When considering the three solutions the

following previously outlined constraints must be

considered:

1. All three solutions met the budgetary

consideration with the cheapest solution being

Solution 2.

2. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) cover both

solution 1 and 2 regarding security of data

between other user of the cloud providers

services however as both solutions use IaaS,

there may still be susceptible in terms of

OneDrum Ltd’s IT Administrators not

patching the servers regularly. Solution 3

would have an added level of security in that

the cloud solution is solely used by OneDrum

Ltd and therefore there is no risk of sharing

resources with other customers.

3. One of the considerations was availability of

the service being above 99.5% to which

services such as Amazon AWS has a service

level agreement which states availability will

be up to 99.95% which therefore would meet

the requirement for both solution 1 and

solution 2. In terms of solution 3, it is harder

to quantify a private cloud solution that is

created specifically for OneDrum Ltd,

however this is why it is important to build in

a high level of redundancy in the hardware

choice.

4. In terms of data recovery Solution 1 and 2

differ. Solution 1 has both IaaS in terms of

web and database servers as well as SaaS

which means that it is covered in terms of

hardware failure of the cloud provider.

However Solution 2 does not have the SaaS

element to the design therefore, software such

as CRM, payroll, CAD and Office are still

dependant on local backups, this therefore is

dependent on the It Administrators. Solution 3

using the private cloud would mean that

redundancy is dependent on the hardware

purchased which in this case has been chosen

to give a level of redundancy.

5. In terms of scalability, Solution 1 and 2 have

the resources of a large cloud provider

therefore scalability is vast. Both Solution 1

and 2 can adapt to compute, storage and

bandwidth scaling but only Solution 1 can

scale application usage in terms of CRM,

Payroll, CAD and Office should new

employees require access to these.

Further to this the following Functional requirements

must be considered:

1. In terms of access restrictions, all solutions

outlined can have user restrictions applied

meaning that each department and user is only

able to access content they have the correct

privileges for. In the case of cloud solutions

there is an added level of protection in terms

of less people having physical access to the

hardware to penitential gain access to the

solution maliciously. However this may not be

the case with Solution 3 as the private cloud

depends on where it is situated and how it is

secured.

2. Cloud services such as Amazon AWS allows

a level of traceability in terms of amount of

resources used (Jeff Barr, 2014) and

Generic Cloud Computing Framework Understanding and Implementation

213

purchased however with IaaS it is down the

the IT Administrator to further log any activity

on the servers. With SaaS however there is a

larger degree of traceability as often service

that track application usage but this is often

dependant on the software. Therefore this is

true to varying degrees for Solution 1 and 2

and due to the high customisability of Solution

3, it is likely that more traceability would be

available using a custom private cloud

solution.

3. All three solutions allow communication to

existing OneDrum Ltd infrastructure via the

internet.

The solutions are all compatible with the current

environment as all solutions purely require an internet

connection on the host computer.

9 FINAL SOLUTION FOR

ONEDRUM LTD

Out of the three solutions, the benefits of using

Solution 1 seem to be greater than the negatives in

terms of meeting the requirements as outlined in the

case Study with a much reduced initial start-up cost

than Solution 3 in creating a custom private cloud.

10 DESIGN DEFINITION

The design definition section will outline in more

detail the components of Solution 1, the chosen

solution to allow for potential future implementation.

10.1 Webserver

The webserver that will host the OneDrum Ltd

website will be migrated over to the Amazon AWS

IaaS it will stay on the same Windows OS as

previously do reduce the time to migrate the website.

This server will be administered by the OneDrum Ltd

IT Administrators and will be setup for limited access

to the Marketing department to upload any website

changes. Further to this it will require a connection to

the Database Server also migrated to the Amazon

AWS IaaS.

10.2 Database Server

This database server will be configured to store the

assets and customer information for the OneDrum Ltd

website. It will be a Linux OS running a MySQL

server. This will be connected to the webserver using

Amazon’s internal networking infrastructure. The IT

Administrators will have administrator access, the

marketing team will have limited access to the

database to change website content and access

customer data.

10.3 Cad Software

The design team will have access to CAD SaaS

applications. This will mean that most of the

processing and rendering can be done using the cloud

providers hardware thus the designer does not need a

high end workstation or any upgrades as all

processing is handle by the cloud vendor.

10.4 CRM Software

The CRM software will also be deployed as a SaaS.

This will be used by the Finance Officers to connect

to the database server in order to retrieve transaction

information for accounting purposes.

10.5 Payroll Software

The Payroll software will also be deployed as a SaaS.

This will be used by the Human Resource employees

to manage finances and payment of employees.

10.6 Network Connections

Current site internet connection will be upgraded to

ensure that increased traffic requirements are met this

includes the addition of a secondary router on a

different line in order to increase the unlikelihood that

an issue with the network at OneDrum Ltd’s site

would cause the inability to use the cloud services.

11 CONCLUSIONS

This paper set out to give an overview and

comparison between different types of cloud

solutions as well as the variations in service offered

by different cloud solution providers. In order to do

this effectively a scenario of a drum kit and accessory

manufacturer called OneDrum Ltd was used. Using a

realistic scenario allowed for the analysis to have a

greater grounding in a likely scenario in which the use

case could be potentially adapted and used on other

projects. From this assessment of the scenario, three

main solutions were produced and discussed that

CLOSER 2016 - 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science

214

would meet the requirements of OneDrum Ltd. These

were: a combined IaaS and SaaS solution that

involved moving two hardware server onto a cloud

platform as well as several key applications, secondly

a solution that used the company’s existing software

assets in combination with IaaS by moving just the

servers onto a cloud platform and finally by creating

a customised Private Cloud Solution and using it for

both IaaS and SaaS.

This has potential to be a model for similar

manufacturing based small or medium businesses.

Solution 1 solution involves a complete committal to

cloud based services with issues such as cloud

provider lock in and added network security

concerns. However it has the advantage of allowing

for a high degree of flexibility in terms of

computation, storage and network bandwidth as well

as application deployment for new employees.

Solution 2 involved less commitment to cloud

services only using the IaaS in order to run a database

and webserver. This allows flexibility in terms of

OneDrum Ltd’s international expansion and e-

commerce but the company would not commit to

cloud solutions in terms of managing their finances

and customers which is potentially the company’s

concern. Finally the third solution involve the

creation of a custom private cloud which has massive

initial cost implications but would provide OneDrum

Ltd with maximum control of their data should

security by the highest priority.

It is considered that these three solutions could be

adapted to suit many different small manufacturing

businesses that want to take advantage of cloud

solutions but have differing priorities regarding their

data.

REFERENCES

Louis Columbus. (2013). Gartner Predicts Infrastructure

Services Will Accelerate Cloud Computing Growth.

Available: http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus

/2013/02/19/gartner-predicts-infrastructure-services-w

ill-accelerate-cloud-computing-growth/. [Last accessed

23rd Mar 2015]

Rackspace. (2014). Moving your Infrastructure to the

Cloud: How to Maximize Benefits and Avoid Pitfalls.

Available: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_cent

er/whitepaper/moving-your-infrastructure-to-the-cloud

-how-to-maximize-benefits-and-avoid-pitfalls. Last

accessed 23rd Mar 2015.

IBM.. (2015). What is cloud?. Available: http://www.ibm.c

om/cloud-computing/in/en/what-is-cloud-computing.h

tml. Last accessed 22rd Mar 2015.

Michael J. Kavis (2014). Architecting the Cloud. New

Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. 13-18.

David Linthicum. (2013). Wrestling with the concept of

private PaaS. Available: http://searchcloudcomputing.t

echtarget.com/feature/Wrestling-with-the-concept-of-

private-PaaS. Last accessed 22rd Mar 2015.

Naresh Kumar . (2012). Advantages and Disadvantages of

SaaS (Software as a Service) Business Model in Cloud

Computing . Available: http://theprofessionalspoint.blo

gspot.co.uk/2012/12/advantages-and-disadvantages-of

-saas.html. Last accessed 21st Mar 2015.

Rene Millman. (2012). Autodesk reveals cloud-based 3D

CAD platform. Available: http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/

saas/5070/autodesk-reveals-cloud-based-3d-cad-platfo

rm. Last accessed 21st Mar 2015.

Dan Sullivan. (2014). IaaS Providers List: Comparison

And Guide. Available: http://www.tomsitpro.com/artic

les/iaas-providers,1-1560.html. Last accessed 22rd Mar

2015.

Script Rock. (2015). Roundup: Best of the Best. Available:

http://www.scriptrock.com/articles/cloud-service-prov

ider-roundup-the-best-of-the-best. Last accessed 24st

Mar 2015.

Vangie Beal. (2015). disk array. Available: http://www.we

bopedia.com/TERM/D/disk_array.html. Last accessed

21st Mar 2015.

Mary Branscombe. (2015). Why you don't need a SAN any

more. Available: http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-

you-dont-need-a-san-any-more/. Last accessed 25th

Mar 2015.

Manek Dubash. (2011). search Hardware / Data Centre

And here's how a datacentre network works....

Available: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/12/d

c_network/. Last accessed 23rd Mar 2015.

Jeff Barr. (2014). Track AWS Resource Configurations

With AWS Config. Available: https://aws.amazon.com/

blogs/aws/track-aws-with-config/. Last accessed 25th

Mar 2015.

Generic Cloud Computing Framework Understanding and Implementation

215