Define the Services and Requirements

Before you start designing cloud infrastructure, or even selecting the products you want to use to implement it, you MUST know what services you want to offer, who your customers are, and what workloads you’re expecting.

We discussed requirements collection at length in Autumn 2016 Q&A session

Russ White started the 2018 course with a presentation on a topic that should be mandatory for anyone claiming to be a network designer or architect: understanding and managing network complexity.

Open-source software is becoming a vital part of data center infrastructure. In this section, Scott Lowe described the impact of open-source on data center design and data center infrastructure, touching on a variety of subjects ranging from Linux & Linux networking to OpenStack and Docker.

This section should help you understand open-source products might fit in your data center design (if at all) and how they would impact other data center design aspects.

As engineers we love to dive deep into technology challenges without considering the real business needs driving the requirements - a topic I explained in several conference talks.

In this assignment you'll define the services and estimate infrastructure requirements for a new data center.

These blog posts published on blog.ipSpace.net provider more details on topics discussed in this module.

In the live Q&A sessions we covered a variety of topics including:

• Inevitability of lock-in
• Viability of CloudStack, ODL and ONOS
• VMware Integrated Openstack and VMware Cloud on AWS
• The role of server CPU speed in requirement gathering phase
• Estimating storage requirements
• What is "mid-sized enterprise data center"?
• Does Huawei matter in data centers?
• OpenStack versus ODL versus ONOS

Even though you don't need more than the planning phase section from Designing a Private Cloud Infrastructure webinar at this point, you might want to watch the whole webinar before proceeding.

Access content

If you’re not familiar with the basics of IPv6, I’d strongly recommend watching the Enterprise IPv6 – The First Steps webinar even if you don't plan to introduce IPv6 in your data center.

Access content

There aren't any simple algorithms to determine link bandwidth sizing. The result is that links are often grossly over-capacity, which wastes money. This webinar describes methods you can use to determine link utilization and size the links in your network.

Access content

It doesn't help if you have the best ideas in the world if you can't present them, so I asked Marjan Bradeško (NIL Data Communications) to explain how to create a great presentation.

Course attendees and instructors recommended these external resources they found useful in their requirement gathering and planning process.

These ipSpace.net webinars describe topics related to this module. Some of them have been included in the recommended or optional self-study materials; you might want to watch all of them.