Building business driven IaaS services with third party software components
Aki Hirn · UTUPub (University of Turku) · 2020
The current cloud landscape is dominated by the major cloud service providers, such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. When the company wants to build its own cloud, there are some matters one needs to clarify before starting. What is inside cloud? How is it built? A problem with building the cloud is finding any guidance. This thesis seeks answers into three research questions. First, how to select components forming the public IaaS cloud? Second, how to add value for the customer with the products offered from the cloud? Third, can the cloud provider’s money and time be saved with automation? Literature review is used to find the theories behind building the cloud and adding value to customer. The automation part is researched by a case study, where a billing component of an IaaS cloud is upgraded and automated. Once the upgrade is done, the change is validated by sending the customers and internal staff a survey. The customers were asked a question about the current backup reporting solution and about improvement compared to previous backup reporting solution. The results showed, that customers preferred the new solution over previous one. Because there was one case study, it couldn’t be stated, that these results mean the customers get more value when they get new and better solutions from their CSP. This case study, nonetheless, reinforced the theories presented in chapters 2-4. In conclusion, while having one case study limits the generalizability of the results, the methodology chosen still succeeded to validate and reinforce existing theories. The thesis also revealed that cloud billing accuracy needs more research.