Describing the Applications to Support

As you work through the following steps, refer to the corresponding appendices in Reference Topics. This will help you build out tags and tag categories; as well as provide a basis for the infrastructure sizing calculations.

Your cloud can be expanded and modified at any time; this step is an initial method to scope and plan your deployment. Some analysis at this phase can enable you to set up the structure of your service catalog and infrastructure in a way that saves time in the future.

The goal of this step is to create a list of the applications. Using the spreadsheet in Appendix A: Application Information for Service Level Agreements, note the:

• Application Name
• Ways in which it can be deployed
• Size of the application

And answer the following questions:

• Is this Cloud-purpose built, or is it an existing application?
• What is the availability requirement?
• Do you have an existing virtual machine(s) that you can use?
• Is the virtual machine restricted to a specific hypervisor; for example, KVM or VMware only?
• Application Category:
  • How your user describes the application
  • How it can be organized for simple searching

Applications can be as complex as financial service industry and ordering systems comprised of multiple virtual machines and complex networks, to a simple Ubuntu virtual machine running Linux. Use the numbers to determine the initial equipment requirements, and the availability levels to determine the required size of groups of specific equipment to support your fault-tolerant or business critical applications.