Essay: Cloud Architectures For MetaSoft - Benefits And Issues.

1. Describe which Cloud architectures you would employ to assist MetaSoft to meet the Board’s strategy?
2. Decribe each of the architectures that you would use, along with your reasons for deploying it.  
3. Describe the benefits and issues that would be the result of your deployment of these architectures.

Cloud Architectures

Cloud architecture can be referred to numerous components in the terms of software capabilities, database, applications and many more (Almorsy, Grundy & Müller, 2016). These components are used in order to leverage the ability of cloud resources for solving various problems faced in the business. The cloud architectures define various components and relationships among them (Erl, Cope & Naserpour, 2017). Some components of cloud architectures include on premise resources, middleware, software components as well as services and cloud resources. The cloud architecture aims at providing various users with a very high bandwidth. It also allows the users to enjoy access of applications and data that is not interrupted (Kavis, 2014). Numerous services that are cloud based have their own different cloud architectures. The architectures are application architecture, hybrid architecture and traditional architecture. 

Application architecture can be defined as a process that defines the overall framework of the application of an organization against its requirements of business (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). The application architecture makes sure that the landscape of application is reliable, manageable and scalable. Practices of the application architecture have the ability to increase the organizational innovation as well as decrease the cost incurred in the maintenance of the system (Jo, Maksymyuk & Strykhalyuk, 2015). The application architecture can be specified based on the functional and business requirements. This involves the definition of interaction among the database, middleware systems and application packages in the terms of coverage of functions. This architecture helps in identifying the problems in integration or any gap in the functional coverage (Hussein & Khalid, 2016). A migration plan can be drawn for the systems that are present at the end of software life cycle or the one that has inherited risks in technology. Application architecture tends to make sure the suite of various applications that are used in order to create composite architecture that would be reliable, scalable, manageable and available. Hybrid architecture

Hybrid architecture has been used by a huge number of organizations. It has been used even more than many other data management term (Upadhyaya & Ahuja, 2017). Hybrid architecture usually connects or more than one public clouds to something present in the data center of Metasoft. The thing that is connected might be a private cloud. Hybrid cloud architecture is actually a mash-up of the on-premises as well as off-premises resources of IT (González-Martínez, Bote-Lorenzo & Gómez-Sánchez, 2015). It can be said that cloud architecture can be referred to a cloud environment which is made up by the mixture of resources of on-premises private cloud that are combined with the third party resources of public cloud which could use some orchestration among them (Wu, Rosen & Wang, 2015). The hybrid architecture allows data and workloads to move between the public and private clouds in a proper manner based on the demands, cost change, needs, gives business a good flexibility (Freet, Agrawal & John, 2015). This architecture also provides various options for the data deployment as well as usage.

Application architecture

Most of the traditional applications are built by using the patterns of three tier architecture. These patterns include middle tier, data tier and presentation tier (Freet, Agrawal & John, 2015). The traditional architecture is deployed on a static infrastructure which does not change. Various traditional applications contain less knowledge regarding the infrastructure that they run in. they assume that the infrastructure on which they run would never change or fail (González-Martínez, Bote-Lorenzo & Gómez-Sánchez, 2015). In case the infrastructure changes or fails it is impossible to recover them. As a result this architecture has to be hosted on a reliable server or network. Traditional architecture is able to scale out or scale up automatically. Scaling has to be done through the projects that are have upgraded extensively and that go through an entire management cycle of organization (González-Martínez, Bote-Lorenzo & Gómez-Sánchez, 2015). The infrastructure is also re configured in order to accommodate various new servers.

The architecture that I would choose for MetaSoft is hybrid architecture because it combines the best of all the worlds like private cloud, public cloud as well as dedicated servers that are working together in any kind of combination (González-Martínez, Bote-Lorenzo & Gómez-Sánchez, 2015). Hybrid cloud architecture is better than any other architecture due to various reasons. These reasons are mentioned below

• Architecture flexibility: Hybrid cloud architecture can help Metasoft to place the workloads in the places where they are supposed to be (González-Martínez, Bote-Lorenzo & Gómez-Sánchez, 2015). The architecture can be aligned for taking advantage of the performance requirements which can be offered by various dedicated servers.
• Technical control: the root access might be granted to the personnel who deserves. The segmentation of custom network might be defined to physically and logically segment the architecture when it is needed (González-Martínez, Bote-Lorenzo & Gómez-Sánchez, 2015). In this architecture, the user can ask for customized hardware which would meet the requirements of MetaSoft.  

Some issues in hybrid architecture are as follows

• Security risks: Security risk is one of the greatest risks that are faced by the hybrid architecture. Adoption of private cloud is done in order to secure the sensitive information of an organization (González-Martínez, Bote-Lorenzo & Gómez-Sánchez, 2015). Usage of hybrid architecture requires management of various security platforms. The transfer of selected data among public and private clouds becomes crucial.
• Integration complexity: integrating the public and private clouds is also considered as one of the biggest problems faced in hybrid architecture. The professionals need higher skills in order to integrate numerous cloud services (Jo, Maksymyuk & Strykhalyuk, 2015). Comparability is the main issue faced during integration.
• Cloud management is a thankless task: there is very little or no configuration of the cloud services to various providers, organizations are allowed to create a strategy that would be effective. It is very difficult to understand the ways to allocate various computational resources because the infrastructure might be different across various cloud service providers (Jo, Maksymyuk & Strykhalyuk, 2015). The ways to deal with various servers which exist in multiple environments is very critical because a firm would require understanding the time when an environment or an application is under provisioned or more provisioned. Along with this, the user requires to account for changing behaviors of resources, networks and end-users. The fact should be considered with the usage of cloud computing nothing can be infinite and the cloud managers should be aware of the levels of maximum scalability (Jo, Maksymyuk & Strykhalyuk, 2015). For this, the user needs to understand the constraints of every environment which is a crucial task for ensuring that the resources are never wasted.
• Network design: Hybrid cloud architecture tends to have a long term success as well as requires excellent work in designing. The network is needed to be accounted for numerous factors like network bandwidth, impact of the location on the network, management between the public as well as private clouds, requirements of network for every individual and many more factors (Jo, Maksymyuk & Strykhalyuk, 2015). Various application sets are to be operated in various parts of the cloud environment. After knowing the scalability requirements of every application this would influence the infrastructure as well as network design. 

References

Almorsy, M., Grundy, J., & Müller, I. (2016). An analysis of the cloud computing security problem. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.01107.

Erl, T., Cope, R., & Naserpour, A. (2017). Cloud Computing Design Patterns (paperback).

Freet, D., Agrawal, R., John, S., & Walker, J. J. (2015, October). Cloud forensics challenges from a service model standpoint: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Management of computational and collective intElligence in Digital EcoSystems (pp. 148-155). ACM.

González-Martínez, J. A., Bote-Lorenzo, M. L., Gómez-Sánchez, E., & Cano-Parra, R. (2015). Cloud computing and education: A state-of-the-art survey. Computers & Education, 80, 132-151.

Hussein, N. H., & Khalid, A. (2016). A survey of Cloud Computing Security challenges and solutions. International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security, 14(1), 52.

Jo, M., Maksymyuk, T., Strykhalyuk, B., & Cho, C. H. (2015). Device-to-device-based heterogeneous radio access network architecture for mobile cloud computing. IEEE Wireless Communications, 22(3), 50-58.

Kavis, M. J. (2014). Architecting the cloud: design decisions for cloud computing service architectures. John Wiley & Sons.

Rittinghouse, J. W., & Ransome, J. F. (2016). Cloud computing: implementation, management, and security. CRC press.

Upadhyaya, J., & Ahuja, N. J. (2017, February). Quality of service in cloud computing in higher education: A critical survey and innovative model. In I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud)(I-SMAC), 2017 International Conference on (pp. 137-140). IEEE.

Wu, D., Rosen, D. W., Wang, L., & Schaefer, D. (2015). Cloud-based design and manufacturing: A new paradigm in digital manufacturing and design innovation. Computer-Aided Design, 59, 1-14.