7986_Best Practices to Architect Applications in the IBM Cloud

7/31/2019 7986_Best Practices to Architect Applications in the IBM Cloud

1/15

Best practices to architect applications in the IBMCloud

Discover a list of component features you need to use for abetter cloud experience

Skill Level: Introductory

Christina LauDistinguished EngineerIBM

Valentina BirsanSenior DeveloperIBM

15 Feb 2011

If your goal is to leverage cloud environments as an additional avenue to deliver yoursoftware, the best practices described in this article (with more to come) demonstratehow to design your applications to achieve a successful cloud-based deploymentmodel. The authors present best practices on provisioning and safeguarding yourvirtual machines (VMs) and storage, and discuss multi-tenancy in your applicationsand middleware to help deliver your applications.

Articles in this series

Best practices for cloud-based asset-centriccollaboration: Achieve collaborative multi-tenancy using

Rational Asset Manager

Best practices to accelerate web content delivery in thecloud: Use Akamai platform for speed and reliability

Best practices for access control in multi-tenant cloudsolutions using Tivoli Access Manager Provide tenantawareness and single sign on while protecting yourapplication resources

Best practices to architect applications in the IBM Cloud Trademarks Copyright IBM Corporation 2011 Page 1 of 15
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-collaborateram/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-collaborateram/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-collaborateram/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-cloudappcomfeatures/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-cloudappcomfeatures/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-cloudTAM/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-cloudTAM/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-cloudTAM/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-cloudTAM/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/trademarks/http://www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtmlhttp://www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtmlhttp://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/trademarks/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-cloudTAM/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-cloudTAM/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-cloudTAM/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-cloudTAM/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-cloudappcomfeatures/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-cloudappcomfeatures/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-collaborateram/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-collaborateram/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-collaborateram/


2/15

There are clear business and technical benefits to delivering your software using thecloud. A cloud-based deployment model can:

Help you accelerate your application's time-to-value (through

middleware).

Help you spend less time and operating costs on owning and maintainingenterprise middleware.

Help you reduce your investment in infrastructure.

For several years, we have been looking at how to leverage cloud computing as analternative delivery model for WebSphere software. Some of the practices that welearned are presented here, and should make it easier for you to adopt cloudcomputing in your development environment.

Advances in both web and mobile technologies let you leverage the open web andcreate more web-based tools that are more accessible to the masses. When youcouple this with the self-service and self-help cloud deployment model, it shouldenable you and your organization to better collaborate with other companies andpartners by making it easier for them to create and share assets beyond theboundaries of their organization and across geography. Also, if you tap into a cloudprovider with a pay-as-you-go pricing model, your applications will benefit from thesame flexible, usage-based structure as is found in the IBM Smart BusinessDevelopment and Test in the IBM Cloud.

This article describes the components found in a common platform for building

software as a service (SaaS) applications (and what your choices are when youconstruct a platform). Next, it discusses multi-tenancy and its four common technicalattributes. To wrap up, it provides a quick lesson on best practices you should knowfor three main tasks when working in the IBM Cloud: Provisioning your virtualmachine, provisioning storage, and saving the virtual machines that run yourapplications.

As a quick guide, the best practices are listed in a sidebar.

A common platform for building SaaS applications

One purpose of this article is to expose the best practices that enable you tomanage SaaS cloud applications and to bring new applications online in the future.To start, one best practice involves:

Deciding on the components to include in the description of a commonSaaS-application-building platform.

developerWorks ibm.com/developerWorks

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/trademarks/http://www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtmlhttp://www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtmlhttp://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/trademarks/


3/15

Understanding why those components are important to this platform.

To do this in the real world, we integrated a number of middleware components fromIBM and from our partners into the IBM Cloud to achieve an end result that providesa rich and common user experience.

Figure 1 shows an architecture overview of this evolving SaaS framework.

Figure 1. Frameworks for building out multi-tenant cloud applications

11 best practices for the IBM Cloud and apps

1. The distance between the end users to the data centercan impact the response time dramatically and internetbottlenecks can affect applications availability.

2. HTML5, CSS3, Dojo, REST, and Ajax foundationtechnologies that help us achieve a user experience that

is fast, interactive, and easy to use alone are notsufficient to support a cloud environment where we haveto dynamically provision applications for our tenantsbased on their subscription.

3. Self-service is an important key for cloud environments:A community portal is where self-service registration isavailable for new tenants.

ibm.com/developerWorks developerWorks



4/15

4. A tenant has no visibility to other tenants' assets on thecloud.

5. Research and understand the concepts of authenticationand security, repositories to capture and share assets,payment integration and transactions, operations

monitoring, and how to design your platform so thatothers can build their own apps that use your data(through REST APIs, for example).

6. Four technical attributes are common to cloudapplications:

The notion of tenants and users.

The ability to secure the assets of a tenant.

The need for the application to be always available.

The need to scale up or down based on actualdemand.

7. Saving your VM (with its provisioned storage) should bedone when you are at a good point in your developmentcycle (after you have configured and tested your softwareon a particular instance).

8. Saving your VM lets you recreate your VM from a privateimage, so you don't have to start over.

9. Best practices point to how important it is to assume thatthings will fail in the cloud.

10. Be patient. If your VM has a lot of data in it, it can takeawhile to save it as a private image.

11. You should always do a test run re-creation of your VMinstance from the saved image at least once to see ifeverything saved correctly.

Here are the components and functions we consider useful for a successful SaaSframework:

Content delivery network integration

User interface frameworks

Community portals

Tenant and users management

Authentication and security

Asset repositories




5/15

Payment integration

Operations monitoring

REST APIs

Content delivery network integration

Web-based cloud applications are dynamic and highly interactive. It is important toensure they perform consistently for users accessing them no matter where they arelocated. However, the distance between the end users to the data center can impactthe response time dramatically and Internet bottlenecks can affect applicationsavailability.

To address these issues, we incorporated the Akamai Web Application Accelerationservice into our SaaS frameworks to provide web content acceleration for our cloudapplications. Requests and application responses between users and the data

center are sent over the Akamai platform. Dynamic mapping technology directs therequest to the closest Akamai server; it identifies the fastest, most reliable path backand employs connection techniques to optimize communication between servers,improving performance and reliability of both retrieval and delivery.

User interface frameworks

You want to create integrated solutions with a shared look and feel and enable auser experience that is fast, interactive, and easy to use. HTML5, CSS3, Dojo,REST, and Ajax are foundation technologies that help you achieve these goals.

However, those technologies alone are not sufficient to support a cloud environmentwhere you have to dynamically provision applications for your tenants based on theirsubscription.

To support this, we incorporated the Business Space frameworks (WebSphere) toprovide a common and consistent delivery of the user interface components.Business Space framework implements the iWidget component model so that wecan aggregate web components together in a uniform fashion.

Community portals

A community portal is a place where you can find recent news and connect with

others via forums, blogs, or other social media. It's also where self-serviceregistration is available for new tenants. Behind the scenes, the self-serviceregistration provisions the applications and resources for the new tenants based ontheir subscription requests.

There are many excellent free software packages such as WordPress and phpBBthat you can use as starting points for blogs and forums. You can easily integrate




6/15

and customize them into your own unique community portal.

Tenant and user management

What defines a tenant?

A tenant can be logically mapped to a company, an organization, or ateam.

A tenant can have one or more users.

A tenant shares the physical infrastructure such as VMs, storage,network, and middleware in a data center with other tenants.

However, tenants have no visibility to each other. Tenant resource isolation isprovided at the user interface and database layers. (An important feature of cloudcomputing, the discussion of tenant resource isolation is complex and involved and

is beyond the scope of this article.)

The first user to register to a tenant becomes the default account administrator.

A tenant provisions its own resources such as its own business spaceswhere it can create its own assets. The assets the tenant creates areisolated from other tenants unless the originating tenant chooses to sharethem publicly.

A user can be invited into an account. A user can also make a request tojoin an existing account using the self-service registration portal; in this

case, the account administrator needs to approve the request.Authentication and security

You need a utility to manage passwords and to ensure proper authentication andauthorization to back-end server resources. This can include password rules such ascomplex passwords with alpha and numeric characters, rules that require users tochange passwords at predefined interval, support for single sign-on across multipleapplications, the use of reverse proxy to provide additional security and encryptioncapabilities, and more. We use Tivoli Access Manager to provide authenticationand authorization.

Asset repositories

Many SaaS applications need to capture and share assets. An asset repositoryplays a crucial role in supporting asset-centric collaboration while maintaining thedesired levels of asset isolation and privacy for tenants. It provides tenants a way topublish and search for assets based on industry or domain. An asset repository canhelp customers adapt to fast growing business by collaborating with partners to




7/15

evolve their assets to cover new business requirements. We use Rational AssetManager in the IBM Cloud to make this easier.

Payment integration

One of the best things about cloud computing is its capability to offer the user morevalue through its pay-as-you-go delivery model. However, you have to be able tomeasure and monitor tenant/user activity to implement accurate billing, so thiscomponent is essential to providing (and consuming) cloud services. We use theIBM Payment systems solutions in our framework.

Operations monitoring

As the number of VMs increase in the infrastructure, it is important to monitor thehealth and well-being of these VMs as well as the applications and databases thatrun on them. An operations monitoring component is deployed in the cloud tomonitor the performance and the availability of cloud instances. By creating a

number of agents to monitor URLs, logs, and network connectivity, you are able todetect problems and in many cases automatically recover from the problems withouthuman intervention. To perform these functions, we use IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM).

REST APIs

It is important to design your platform in such a way that others can build their ownweb or mobile apps to present your platform data in new and different ways. Wedeveloped a set of common REST APIs that enable users to read and write data toour platform. For example, APIs that let users:

Sign up for an account, login, or invite others to join your account -- usefulfor others to integrate your SaaS applications into their own site.

Search for assets, news, and other items -- useful for sharing publiccontent from your cloud with others.

Now let's look at multi-tenancy in cloud applications.

Multi-tenant cloud applications

Multi-tenancy refers to the ability of services to be offered to multiple tenants in away so that each tenant operates as logically isolated while, in fact, using physicallyshared resources. Examples of multi-tenant cloud applications start with our earlywork on IBM LotusLive and expand through our work on IBM BPM BlueWorks andCast Iron, all the way to our newest IBM Blueworks Live.

While each cloud application serves a different business purpose, from onlinecollaboration to integration to documenting and running processes in cloud, they all




8/15

share a number of common technical attributes:

The notion that users make up a tenant (or a team). A tenant uses aSaaS application as if they own it, but they actually do not own a copy ofthe application.

The ability to secure the assets of a tenant. SaaS applications allowgeographically distributed teams to easily collaborate to create assets andaccelerate consensus. Just because they have created the assets, it maynot mean they want to share them widely across all the stakeholders.Supporting finer grained privacy settings on assets, protecting sensitivedata such as personal identification, are examples of things that need tobe considered.

The need for the offering to be always available. As an offering becomesmore popular or more mission critical, reducing any downtime due toapplication or infrastructure maintenance will become increasinglyimportant.

The need to scale up or down based on actual demand. By monitoring theactual usage, the frameworks can dynamically provision and addadditional VMs into the system to handle the workload, and remove theVMs if they are not utilized.

Three tasks to know in the IBM Cloud

The IBM Cloud provides a scalable infrastructure for development, test, and other

dynamic workloads such as web-based or analytics solutions. In our experience,best practices point to three main tasks you need to learn to get started:

1. Provisioning a VM

2. Provisioning storage

3. Saving a VM

Provision your VM

The first task is to provision a virtual machine (VM) on the IBM Cloud. This can bedone easily by using the Add Instance wizard shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Provisioning a virtual machine on the IBM Cloud via the wizard




9/15

Determine which data center you want your VM to reside and select an existing baseimage to base your VM from. The IBM Cloud is currently available in Raleigh, NorthCarolina and Boulder, Colorado, USA; Toronto, Ontario, Canada; and Ehningen,Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. More geographies are being added over time.

Note: It might not matter where cloud applications are physically located, howeversome locations have government regulations that you must follow.

A large number of base images are available to help you reduce the time that isneeded to install software. Once you have selected your configurations, submit yourrequest and wait for it to be provisioned. After your VM is provisioned, use a tool




10/15

such as PuTTY and your own SSH (Secure Shell) key to get into the VM and startinstalling or configuring additional software.

Provision your storage

The second task that is useful is to provision storage for your solution. Storage isessential if you want to share files between multiple VMs or if you want to persistsome files so that they are still available if you delete your VM.

You can easily provision storage on the IBM Cloud by using the Add Storage wizardshown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Provisioning storage on the IBM Cloud via the wizard

Save your VMs

The third task is very important. Save your VMs. This should be done when you areat a good point in your development cycle, and have configured and tested yoursoftware on a particular instance.




11/15

By saving your instance, you save all your configuration work such as firewall andother settings. If something happens to your VM, you can recreate it from the privateimage that you saved without having to start from the beginning.

Best practices point to how important it is to assume that things can fail in the cloud.

Sa situation that you cannot control. For example, there are outages in the datacenter and the network can fail By designing applications in ways to recover fromfailures, you can bring applications back up as fast as possible.

To save your VM, use the Create private image wizard shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Creating an image on the IBM Cloud via the wizard




12/15

This operation can take a long time if your VM has a lot of data. After your VM issuccessfully saved, it is a good practice to recreate your instance from the savedimage to make sure every thing is recreated properly from the image.

In conclusion

This article introduced you to best practices from our own experiences pertaining tocloud application deployment architectures. It provided a high level overview ofsome of the key components that you may want to consider when designing your




13/15

own cloud applications.

Future topics will include tenant resource isolation, provide insight into how toleverage the dynamic nature of the cloud, how to ensure your applications aresecure and resilient to failure, and the impact of mobile computing on cloud

computing development.




14/15

Resources

Learn

Check out the resources mentioned in this article:

IBM Blueworks Live

IBM LotusLive

IBM BPM BlueWorks, a WebSphere cloud experiment

WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration

Key features of IBM Blueworks Live

Akamai Web Application Accelerator

IBM payment systems solutions

Tivoli Access Manager for e-business and IBM Tivoli Monitoring

Rational Asset Manager

WordPress.org

phpBB open source bulletin board software

In the developerWorks cloud developer resources, discover and shareknowledge and experience of application and services developers building theirprojects for cloud deployment.

The next steps: Find out how to access IBM Smart Business Development andTest on the IBM Cloud.

Get products and technologies

See the product images available on the IBM Smart Business Development andTest on the IBM Cloud.

Discuss

Join a cloud computing group on developerWorks.

Read all the great cloud blogs on developerWorks.

Join the developerWorks community, a professional network and unified set ofcommunity tools for connecting, sharing, and collaborating.

About the authors


https://www.blueworkslive.com/https://www.lotuslive.com/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/0907_col_lau/0907_col_lau.htmlhttp://www.castiron.com/integration-solutions/index.htmlhttp://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/bpmjournal/1101_col_jamison/1101_jamison.htmlhttp://www.akamai.com/waahttp://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/offering/igs/a1031872http://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/access-mgr-e-bus/http://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/monitor/http://www.ibm.com/software/awdtools/ram/http://wordpress.org/http://www.phpbb.com/https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/index.htmlhttp://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/igs/cloud-development/instances.htmlhttp://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/igs/cloud-development/instances.htmlhttp://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/devtest.htmlhttps://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/groups/service/html/allcommunities?tag=cloud&page=1https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/home/tags/cloud?lang=enhttps://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/trademarks/http://www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtmlhttp://www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtmlhttp://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/trademarks/https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/home/tags/cloud?lang=enhttps://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/groups/service/html/allcommunities?tag=cloud&page=1http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/devtest.htmlhttp://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/igs/cloud-development/instances.htmlhttp://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/igs/cloud-development/instances.htmlhttps://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/index.htmlhttp://www.phpbb.com/http://wordpress.org/http://www.ibm.com/software/awdtools/ram/http://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/monitor/http://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/access-mgr-e-bus/http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/offering/igs/a1031872http://www.akamai.com/waahttp://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/bpmjournal/1101_col_jamison/1101_jamison.htmlhttp://www.castiron.com/integration-solutions/index.htmlhttp://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/0907_col_lau/0907_col_lau.htmlhttps://www.lotuslive.com/https://www.blueworkslive.com/


15/15

Christina Lau

Christina Lau is a distinguished engineer in WebSphere, experienced insuch emerging technologies as cloud and mobile computing. Hercurrent focus is on developing advanced technologies that support thedelivery of online cloud services across the BPM, connectivity, and

ILOG portfolio.

Valentina Birsan

Valentina Birsan is a senior developer in WebSphere, currently focusedon cloud projects. Previously Valentina was a technical lead on RationalApplication Developer. Valentina was one of the initial members of theEclipse TPTP open source project and served as the chair of the TPTPArchitecture Group. She was the lead architect for the Cosmos ServiceModeling Eclipse open source project and member of the SML openstandard.



Date post:	05-Apr-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	nga-hoang
View:	218 times
Download:	0 times

7986_Best Practices to Architect Applications in the IBM Cloud

Documents