Question

10. Give major drawbacks of outsourcing your IT infrastructure?

11. What does Eucalyptus stand for?

12. Name the five components of Eucalyptus.

13. Give two ways/levels of accessing the Eucalyptus?

14. What are the benefits of Eucalyptus?

Answer 1

10.

Advantages of Outsourcing

1. You Get More Experts

Your core team might be fantastic at a few things, but nobody is perfect at everything. By outsourcing particular tasks, companies are often able to substantially improve performance by drawing on the niche skills of experts in certain fields.

2. Things Get Done Fast

One of the top reasons small businesses tend to outsource work is because it will get done quicker. If you’re working with a limited number of staff members, you can get things done a whole lot quicker by passing time-consuming tasks on to freelancers or external agencies.

. You’re Able to Focus on What Matters

Another benefit of outsourcing tasks is enhanced freedom. By passing on supporting processes, you’ll be able to concentrate your skills on strengthening and improving the core processes that help make your business tick.

4. You Can Share Some Risk

One of the most important factors in any project is risk assessment and analysis. By outsourcing certain campaigns or processes on to experts in their respective fields, you will benefit from their enhanced ability to plan and mitigate potential risks.

. You Can Reduce Costs

As one might imagine, outsourcing piecemeal work is almost always going to be cheaper than hiring permanent full time staff. Not only will you save time and money on recruitment, but your profit will also be extended than s to shorter overheads.

6. You Can Work Around the Clock

One major benefit of outsourcing digital work overseas is the substantial differences you might encounter in terms of time zones and holidays. Although this can pose an initial hurdle logistically, once overcome it can effectively mean your business is running even while you’re fast asleep.

7. You Can Simplify Project Management

If you choose to outsource work via a wide range of specialist freelance websites and online services, you’re often provided dynamic and intuitive platforms that will help you to effectively manage what’s being done, when it’s due for submission and how it will be paid. Most of this can be automated, freeing up your time for more important work.

8. You Simplify Work Relationships

Quite a few small business teams are tight-knit groups of friends and family — which is fantastic. But when you’re incredibly close to your staff members, it can also lead to issues when work isn’t being done up to par. By outsourcing work, you’ll typically be able to minimize work relationships to simple, contractual arrangements.

9. Efforts Are More Targeted

Another overlooked advantage of outsourcing is that it enables you to plan and execute more effective, targeted campaigns and projects that you wouldn’t ordinarily be able to take on. This gives your business the chance to take new risks and experiment with different methods of exposure.

10. You Get Peace of Mind

At the end of the day, choosing to outsource with a reliable individual or agency should give you peace of mind that tasks are being handled expertly and efficiently without you having to worry or lift a finger. What could be better?

Disadvantages of Outsourcing

1. You Lose Some Control

As you might expect, when you farm work out to external agencies or freelancers, you’re losing control of how those tasks are being monitored and performed. So long as you know and trust who you’ve hired, that shouldn’t be a huge issue – but you’ve got to tread carefully.

2. There are Hidden Costs

Although outsourcing work is generally considered cheaper, yo must also beware of getting ripped off. Outsourcing companies or big agencies will typically ask small business owners to sign lengthy contractual agreements, and they’ll include plenty of fine print. If you don’t read the terms carefully, you could get hit with unexpected costs.

3. There are Security Risks

In this age of data protection, it’s essential that you exercise caution whenever using customer data. If you plan to outsource processes that require personal data, you could be placing the privacy of others or security of your business at risk by passing that data on to other people.

. You Reduce Quality Control

Outsourcing companies and some freelancers may often be motivated by profit rather than a job well done. That means the work you send out may come back quickly, but will lack the standard and quality that customers have come to expect from your products or services.

. You Share Financial Burdens

Although it can be nice to bring in expert agencies to share in risks, it can be pretty dangerous to tie your business to the financial well-being of another company. Again, you’ve got to spell out any and all terms and conditions in contractual arrangements plainly – because you don’t want to take a financial hit if they fail to deliver.

6. You Risk Public Backlash

If you’re taking work overseas (even just to write a blog or two), your business very well may run into ill will from consumers that have taken a moral stance against outsourcing. Right or wrong, for better or for worse, some form of criticism is often inevitable.

7. You Shift Time Frames

One major disadvantage of outsourcing particular tasks is the risk that your freelancers or partner agency may be marching to the beat of a different drum. As a result, it might be difficult to synchronize schedules in order to ensure your customers receive what’s promised to them on a reliable timeline.

11.

Eucalyptus is an open source software platform for implementing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in a private or hybrid cloud computing environment.

The Eucalyptus cloud platform pools together existing virtualized infrastructure to create cloud resources for infrastructure as a service, network as a service and storage as a service. The name Eucalyptus is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems.

Eucalyptus was founded out of a research project in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and became a for-profit business called Eucalyptus Systems in 2009. Eucalyptus Systems announced a formal agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in March 2012, allowing administrators to move instances between a Eucalyptus private cloud and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to create a hybrid cloud. The partnership also allows Eucalyptus to work with Amazon’s product teams to develop unique AWS-compatible features.

Eucalyptus features include:

• Supports both Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs).
• Application program interface- (API) compatible with Amazon EC2 platform.
• Compatible with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Simple Storage Service (S3).
• Works with multiple hypervisors including VMware, Xen and KVM.
• Can be installed and deployed from source code or DEB and RPM packages.
• Internal processes communications are secured through SOAP and WS-Security.
• Multiple clusters can be virtualized as a single cloud.
• Administrative features such as user and group management and reports.

Version 3.3, which became generally available in June 2013, adds the following features:

• Auto Scaling: Allows application developers to scale Eucalyptus resources up or down based on policies defined using Amazon EC2-compatible APIs and tools
• Elastic Load Balancing: AWS-compatible service that provides greater fault tolerance for applications
• CloudWatch: An AWS-compatible service that allows users to collect metrics, set alarms, identify trends, and take action to ensure applications run smoothly
• Resource Tagging: Fine-grained reporting for showback and chargeback scenarios; allows IT/ DevOps to build reports that show cloud utilization by application, department or user
• Expanded Instance Types: Expanded set of instance types to more closely align to those available in Amazon EC2. Was 5 before, now up to 15 instance types.
• Maintenance Mode: Allows for replication of a virtual machine’s hard drive, evacuation of the server node and provides a maintenance window.

12.

Components of Eucalyptus:

1. Cluster Controller (CC) Cluster Controller manages the one or more Node controller and responsible for deploying and managing instances on them. It communicates with Node Controller and Cloud Controller simultaneously. CC also manages the networking for the running instances under certain types of networking modes available in Eucalyptus.

2. Cloud Controller (CLC) Cloud Controller is front end for the entire ecosystem. CLC provides an Amazon EC2/S3 compliant web services interface to the client tools on one side and interacts with the rest of the components of the Eucalyptus infrastructure on the other side.

3. Node Controller (NC) It is the basic component for Nodes. Node controller maintains the life cycle of the instances running on each nodes. Node Controller interacts with the OS, hypervisor and the Cluster Controller simultaneously.

4. Walrus Storage Controller (WS3) Walrus Storage Controller is a simple file storage system. WS3 stores the the machine images and snapshots. It also stores and serves files using S3 APIs.

5. Storage Controller (SC) Allows the creation of snapshots of volumes. It provides persistent block storage over AoE or iSCSI to the instances.

13.

Access control is used to provide restriction to users. Each user will get a unique identity. All identities can be grouped and managed by access control.

Eucalyptus elastic block storage (EBS) provides block-level storage volumes, which we can attach to an instance.

Auto scaling and load balancing is used to automatically create or destroy instances or services based on requirements. CloudWatch provides different metrics for measurement.

14.

The advantages of the Eucalyptus cloud

• Eucalyptus can be used to get the advantages of both the public and private clouds.
• Users can run Amazon or Eucalyptus machine images as instances on both the clouds.
• It has 100 per cent API compatibility with all the AWS services. There are many tools developed to interact seamlessly between AWS and Eucalyptus.
• Eucalyptus can be used with DevOps tools such as Puppet and Chef. Popular SDKs like AWS SDKs for Java and Ruby and Fog work smoothly with Eucalyptus.
• It is not very popular in the market but is a strong competitor to OpenStack and CloudStack.