gipi的學習筆記-經營管理、數據思考、終身學習

Nimbula這家公司是由Amazon EC2公有雲服務團隊所創立，預計在今年秋天的時候推出雲端作業系統，目前有兩家比較大的投資公司：Sequoia Capital與VMWare。

目前釋出的資料不多，連白皮書也只有少少的數頁，所以這邊也只能針對他已經提供出來的資料去做個簡單的介紹，他的Key Features有以下幾項(參考Nimbula

technology)：

• Self-healing and self-organizing – Robust fail over mechanisms, including monitoring of services and nodes and automated service replacement, ensure system reliability and resilience.
  
• Flexible and powerful group-based Authorization Service – Fine-grained permissions management based on policy supports advanced access control of multiple users and groups.
  
• Multi-tenancy – The Authorization Service allows multiple customers, groups and users to co-exist in isolation from each other or share resources on a single site.
  
• Federation – The Federation Service supports request forwarding to external sites, such as public clouds, subject to Nimbula’s fine-grained permissions management. This authorization filter facilitates powerful control and access management currently unavailable on public cloud offerings. The Federation Service provides a uniform API interface to both local and remote private and public clouds.
  
• Sophisticated placement – Instance placement can be specified with respect to the type of machine on which the instance should run and the proximity to other instances, including whether instances should run on the same or a different node or cluster. This is useful when providing redundancy, where for example it wouldn't be desirable to launch a fail over database server instance on the same physical machine as the original database server. Instance proximity also impacts on network performance with close instances providing lower-latency, higher bandwidth and more reliable connectivity.
  
• Integration with existing user services – Nimbula's Authentication Service supports Active Directory/LDAP, facilitating hassle free user management and the efficient reuse of existing corporate user databases.
  
• Advanced networking – Besides supporting flat standard IP allocation, the Nimbula Cloud OS allows customers to create and declare their own virtual ethernets. This enables the launching of instances in multiple isolated layer 2 networks where customers may provide their own DHCP server and other layer 2 services, such as multicast broadcast and non IP ethernet protocols. Applications may be assigned to network security groups and have security policy enforced independently of the underlying network topology. This eliminates the complexity of porting applications that rely on layer 2 communication into the cloud as they can run unmodified.
  
• A clean 'network' API – A RESTful HTTP API with JSON encoding supports a rich set of functionality and a simple and robust interface to cloud resources.
  
• Dynamic storage allocation – Storage volumes can be created and deleted via the API and these volumes can be dynamically attached and detached from instances. The ability to automate disk allocation as needed increases operational efficiency by removing the dependence on system administrators to perform disk allocations.
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• Integrated system metrics and reporting – All requests, incidents and events are subject to comprehensive recording and reporting, providing a rich audit trail and detailed graphical summary of cloud status in near real time.
  
• All Xen or KVM compatible operating systems supported – KVM and Xen hypervisor technologies provide support for compute instances running a wide variety of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD and AIX. Existing applications running on a wide range of operating systems can easily be moved to the cloud as Nimbula supports a host of guest operating systems.
  

以下是Nimbula邏輯上的技術架構，它可透過Commad line、Custom Apps與其他Web的系統介面來與Nimbula API做溝通，而Nimbula API可透過Hypervisor(KVM and/or Xen)來控制與管理Storage、Network與Compute。
 

不過以上這張圖片太過抽象，我還是比較喜歡下面這張，將Key Features跟Logical Model結合在一起，也將Infrastructure controller(IC)的位置畫了出來，清楚多了，而在Nimbula中提到的Node也在這邊被畫出來了，實際上一個Node可能就是一個實體的Server、Networking Device或是Storage，透過Cluster將這些機器做很有效率的結合，不過他在解釋的時候有句話讓我比較在意，那就是The cluster is the compute backbone of the Nimbula Cloud OS and consists of a number of x86 based computers，這意思是Node不能是x64 based嗎？有點怪怪的。


資料不多，沒辦法很清楚的看清楚它的整體優點有多少，不過我自己看完後大致上有看到幾點還不錯的Key Benefits：
1.允許你用Nimbula建置在自己的Data Center
2.支援較複雜的Infrastructure架構(Network、OS、Hypervisor…)
3.可透過API直接控制Nimbula API(看起來可以Runtime控制，太美妙了。)

Nimbula目前還在beta中，而發展的roadmap似乎也不是鎖定所有的產業，目前的beta客戶共有六間，都是國際級的大公司，範圍涵蓋金融業、科技業跟健康照護等產業，期待它釋出更多的資料吧。

參考資料：
Nimbula Cloud Infrastructure Software
Architects of Amazon Web Services Launch Nimbula, Promise an OS for the Cloud
Private Cloud Redux – Nimbula Bets on Today’s Reality

游舒帆 (gipi) 探索原力Co-founder，曾任TutorABC協理與鼎新電腦總監，並曾獲選兩屆微軟最有價值專家 ( MVP )，離開職場後創辦探索原力，致力於協助青少年培養面對未來的能力。認為教育與組織育才其實息息相關，都是在為未來儲備能量，2018年起成立為期一年的專題課程《職涯躍升的關鍵24堂課》，為培養台灣未來的領袖而努力。