Cisco Cisco Prime Network Services Controller 3.0 White Paper

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The Relationship Between IaaS and PaaS

To build a dynamically configurable virtual data center a provider can decide on a certain “blueprint.” This might be

provided through a UI canvas or through a form-based blueprint buildup wizard. The provider can then define a
certain “superset” virtual data center based on the zone model described in this paper:

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The “superset container” includes the maximum available objects and their interconnects.

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All objects that construct the VDC are managed through its lifecycle.

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All objects that construct the VDC can be included or excluded.

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VDCs are created on a certain PoD; the PoD becomes a single resource pool for both virtual and physical

services.

The virtual data center conceptual model described in this paper has the following characteristics:

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An orderable service that is a collection of many network services objects, virtual and physical.

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It provides network connectivity and network services: Routing, firewall, load-balancing, app acceleration,

and so on.

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It’s a collection of the networking components, networking services, and VM resources, as well as the

application resources.

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The placement of all those objects can be distributed but needs to be predictable and scalable without

losing performance.

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VDC is a baseline for resource management, modeling, and assurance.

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VDC is abstracted from the actual application definition and supports multilayered and multitiered

applications.

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Add, delete, and modify functions on a VDC should not affect the availability of the applications installed on

top of it.

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Applications get attached to a VDC, forming a PaaS layer on top of the IaaS components.

From our experience, end users for cloud services can be nontechnical, IT personnel, infrastructure engineers and

application engineers, as well as security engineers. Application-oriented end users would want to be able to

simplify the network details and use their service for their application, provided with an application view only. In

reality the PaaS cannot be provided without the networking automation detailed in this paper; however, it can be

easily abstracted. For this abstraction the PaaS view can use only the underlying zones to refer back to the IaaS

detail. Figure 13 shows an example.