7/24/2017 Behind the Cloud: 5 Keys to Building a True Cloud Service - Dell Boomi

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Behind the Cloud: 5 Keys to Building a True Cloud

Service

Posted by James Ahlborn on May 19th, 2017Share this Story

With the current popularity of the terms cloud washing, its good to start off with a basic
premise: You cant migrate a traditional on-premise application to a hosted environment like
Amazon or Microsoft Azure and call it a cloud service.

Theres already a name for that software delivery model. Its called application service provider
(ASP). Not cloud. If you want to explore the differences, heres one place to start.

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Boomi has been offering a true cloud service an integration platform as a service (iPaaS)
for 11 years now. So, for us, it is a very important distinction between an on-premise
middleware hosted on a cloud and a cloud-native service, designed from its inception to take
full advantage of the cloud.

Here are ve things weve found most important in building an industry-leading cloud service.

1. Multi-tenancy
The primary bene t of multi-tenancy is shared resources, which translates to lower costs. Lets
say you have 500 customers running processes, but theyre not all running at the same time. If
you have 500 separate instances, you have a lot of idle resources.

But, if you put them all on one instance, you can balance the tenants that use a lot of resources
with those that use fewer. This averages out so you get effective use of your shared resources,
even with lots of customers. Of course, there will be times when most customers are using a
lot of resources. Thats why you design a multi-tenant environment with headroom, room to
grow and use other control measures.

Examples of such control measuresinclude managinghow much work can be done at one time
in orderto spread out load spikes. The typical approachis to use queueing so that you can
manage how much activity takes place at any given time. You also need to be able toelastically
allocate more resources as needed (and de-allocate when no longer necessary).

There are other advantages as well. For example, with a multi-tenant architecture you can make
software updates once and share them with everyone. Heres a good discussion
ofmultitenancys innate advantages one of many such articles you can nd online.

2. Security
The ip side of shared resources is security. Whenever you have customers sharing the same
resources, you must ensure that everybodys information is secure and that theres no situation
where one of your customers can get to somebody elses information. So, day in and day out,
security is concern number one for us and our customers.

When it comes to security, a true cloud, multi-tenant solution provides a greater level of security
than on-premise installed software. When you look at traditional software practices, security is
largely perimeter based. And that means once you get past the controls at the edge the
rewall, etc. youre in.

But at Boomi, we talk about a multi-layered security model. And thats where multi-tenancy and
tenant isolation comes into play. So even if a perimeter breach occurs youre in the building
so to speak each tenant has its own private key for data encryption.In addition, there are
various industry standards and security certi cations to which Boomi adheres that contribute
to a secure environment.

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We alsoprovide the controls and tools for our customers to manage security, access, and
authentication within their account. For example, we support custom roles so that customers
can segment what people can and cant do in the account. The ability to enforce different
access controls within a tenant is very important, especially if an organization has to meet
industry-speci c requirements around certi cation or compliance.

3. Quality of Service
When youre gaining the bene ts of shared resources, you need to ensure that no customer
monopolizes any resource. And that means setting controls on resource allocation. Thats one
of the biggest learning curves for cloud serviceproviders.

With thousands of customers, you can guarantee someone will accidentally or intentionally
overuse a resource thats not controlled. Its what I call the Murphys Law of multi-tenancy. If
you dont manage it, they will abuse it.

Heres a tip: if you want the bene ts of a cloud service, you need a vendor who knows how to
manage the chaos of shared services. Its like living in a house with a lot of people. Someone
must be in charge.

In our production cloud, we manage the number of processes a customer can run at one time.
We also managehow much data customers can work with, how much tracking information
they can recordand send back to the platform, and how much historical information we
maintain.

The cost of maintaining information increases over time. You get more customers and they do
more work. You have to balance how much is useful to your customer versus the cost to
maintain it.

4. Performance
Cloud services handle a variety of use cases, often aligned with a particular industry. But
regardless of the use case, when organizations decide to use a cloud offeringthey necessarily
give up some measure of control. To compensate for that, a cloud service should provide its
customers with insight into the services performance.

The Boomi Trust site is how we ful ll that obligation. We are transparent with customers
regarding the performance and availability of the Dell Boomi AtomSphere Cloud.

Trust.boomi.com provides live and historical data on system performance, noti cations on
planned maintenance, and information on how we secure data. All this is to provide our
customers with the visibility they need to understand the performance status of the Boomi
cloud service.

5. Crowd-sourced Intelligence
With a true cloud platform, you can glean information from your user community that bene ts
everyone. When everybody is in their own silo, they cant learn from anybody else; they cant

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help anybody else. But, when everybodys using a shared system, the system can learn by
seeing how everyone is using the system.

Of course, there are data privacy issues, but theyre not insurmountable by any means. And,
common sense plays a role here.Certainly,if customers dont want to take part in
crowdsourcing, they can opt out.

In terms of the information that we gather at Boomi, one concept that guides us is that if
multiple people do something, its likely that we can learn from it and improve our servicein a
way that will be useful to the wider community.Andif a lot of people are doing it, it probably
doesnt rely on proprietary information.

So, with the wisdom of the crowd, our customers can capture the best answers and most
innovative ideas from the experienced Boomi user community. They dont have to start from
scratch or rely only on in-house knowledge.

Crowd-sourced intelligence is an opportunity that any cloud solution provider should take
advantage of.

About the Author

James Ahlborn is chief software architect and a Distinguished Engineer at Dell Boomi.

Categories: Boomi/AtomSphere Tips Cloud

iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service) PaaS

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