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Chapter 3
Cloud Infrastructure

What is Cloud Infrastructure?

Cloud Infrastructure
• Refers to the hardware and software components - such as
servers, storage, a network and virtualization software - that are
needed to support the computing requirements of a cloud
computing model

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What is Cloud Infrastructure?

• Data centers are important infrastructures to support various
cloud computing services such as
– Web search
– Email
– Video streaming
– Social networking
– Distributed file systems
– Distributed data
processing

What is Cloud Infrastructure?

• A data center is often built with a large number of servers
through a huge interconnected network
• The key components of a data center design include routers,
switches, firewalls, storage systems, servers, etc
– The core of a cloud is the server cluster (or VM cluster)
– Cluster nodes are used as compute nodes

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What is Cloud Infrastructure?

• A data center can be a single server or complex with
hundreds of servers on racks
– Companies (like Amazon or Microsoft) that offer public cloud computing
services have data centers that they then make available to other
organizations

• Inside a data center, a large number of computing and storage

nodes are interconnected by a specially designed network,
called data center network (DCN)
– A critical core design of a data center is the interconnection network
among all servers in the data-center cluster

What is Cloud Infrastructure?

• Standard data center networking for the cloud

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DCN Design Challenges and Requirements

• Large Scale
– Modern DC to contain hundreds of thousands of servers
– Microsoft is hosting over 1 million servers in over 100 data centers

• Wide variety of Applications

– Web search, Web mail, and interactive Games
– Infrastructure services such as distributed file systems and
distributed execution engines
– The diversified services and applications in DCs define a variety of
different traffic characteristics

DCN Design Challenges and Requirements

• High Energy Consumption

– The annual data center energy consumption in the USA was estimated to be
more than 100 billion kWh in 2011
– 7.4 billion USD annual electricity cost

• Strict Service Requirement

– 24 hours availability, which demands high system robustness
– Network failures from hardware, software, and human errors can be
inevitable
• Constant monitoring and agile failure recovery are required

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DCN Design Challenges and Requirements

• This network design must meet five special requirements:
– low latency
– high bandwidth
– low cost
– message-passing interface (MPI) communication support
– fault tolerance

Reading Assignment
Data Center Networking Structure

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Data Center Networking Structure

Intra Data Center Networks
• Highly complex since they interconnect a massive amount
of devices with critical performance requirements
– Ethernet is commonly used in data center networks
• Three types of connections:
– Server-switch connection
– Switch-switch connection
– Server-server connection
• Two approaches to building DCNs
– Switch-centric topologies
– Server-centric topologies

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Data Center Networking Structure

Switch-centric topologies
• Switches take the primary responsibility in network construction and
data transmission
• The switches are usually connected by hierarchy topologies and the servers are
generally connected to the low-level switches at network edge

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Data Center Networking Structure

Switch-centric topologies
• Only server-switch and switch-switch connections, no server-server
• There are multiple equal cost paths between any two hosts
• Example: Fat-Tree , Flattened Butterfly

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Data Center Networking Structure

Server-centric topologies
• In switch-centric topologies, servers are merely endpoints in the network
• In server-centric topologies, servers act as not only end hosts, but also
relaying the traffic

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Data Center Networking Structure

Intra Data Center Networks
Switch-centric vs. Server-centric
Server-centric architectures
• Enjoy the high programmability of servers, but servers usually have
larger processing delays than do switches
Switch-centric architectures
• Enjoy the fast switching capability of switches, but switches are less
programmable than servers
• The advantage of Fat-Tree is that all switches are identical and cheap
commodity products can be used for all switches
• A drawback of Fat-Tree is its high cabling complexity

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Data Center Networking Structure

Inter Data Center Networks
• Geographically distributed data centers have been built
– Services from a local data center generally incur low latency
– Data backup and restore across geo-distributed data centers
can help avoid single point of failure
• Choice of the data center locations are influenced by multiple factors
– Geography: Regions with minimum possibility of natural disasters;
Climate which support free cooling
– Electricity: Cost, reliability, and cleanliness of the electricity are
important
– Connectivity: High quality of network connectivity

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