5. Feature Set and Requirements from Infrastructure

A profile Profiles, Profile Extensions & Flavours specifies the configuration of a Cloud Infrastructure node (host or server). Profile Extensions (specialisations) may specify additional configurations. Workloads use profiles to describe the configuration of nodes on which they can be hosted to execute on. Workload flavours provide a mechanism to specify the VM or Pod sizing information to host the workload. Depending on the requirements of the workloads, a VM or a Pod is deployed according to the specified flavour information on a node configured according to the specified profile. Not only do the nodes (the hardware) have to be configured but some of the capabilities also need to be configured in the software layers (such as Operating System and Virtualisation Software). Therefore, a profile can be defined in terms of the configuration required in the software layers, the Cloud Infrastructure software profile, and the hardware, the Cloud Infrastructure Hardware Profile.

5.1. Cloud Infrastructure software profile description

The Cloud Infrastructure software layer is composed of the following two layers:

• The virtualisation infrastructure layer. This layer is based on hypervisor virtualisation technology or container-based virtualisation technology. Container virtualisation can be nested in hypervisor-based virtualisation.

• The host operating system (OS) layer.

Figure 5.1 Cloud Infrastructure software layers

Ref	Cloud Infrastructure software	Type	Definition/notes	Capabilities reference (1)
infra.sw.001	Host operating system	<value>	Values, such as Ubuntu20.04, Windows 10 Release #, and so on.	e.cap.021
infra.sw.002	Virtualisation infrastructure layer	<value>	Values, such as KVM, Hyper-V, Kubernetes, and so on.	e.cap.022

(1) Reference to the capabilities defined in Infrastructure Capabilities, Measurements and Catalogue.

For a host (a compute node or a physical server), the virtualisation layer is an abstraction layer between the hardware components (compute, storage, and network resources) and the virtual resources allocated to a VM or a Pod. Figure 5.2 represents the virtual resources (virtual compute, virtual network, and virtual storage) allocated to a VM or a Pod and managed by the Cloud Infrastructure manager.

Figure 5.2 Cloud Infrastructure virtual resources

A Cloud Infrastructure software profile is a set of features, capabilities, and metrics offered by a Cloud Infrastructure software layer and configured in the software layers (the Operating System (OS) and the virtualisation software (such as the hypervisor)). Figure 5.3 depicts a high-level view of the basic and high-performance Cloud Infrastructure profiles.

Figure 5.3 Cloud Infrastructure software profiles

The following sections detail the Cloud Infrastructure software profile capabilities according to the type of virtual resource.

5.1.1. Virtual compute profiles

Table 5-1 and Table 5-2 depict the features related to virtual compute.

Reference	Feature	Type	Description	Capabilities reference
infra.com.cfg.001	CPU allocation ratio	<value>	The number of virtual cores per physical core.	i.cap.016
infra.com.cfg.002	NUMA alignment	Yes/No	Support of NUMA at the host OS and the virtualisation layers, in addition to the hardware.	e.cap.007
infra.com.cfg.003	CPU pinning	Yes/No	This feature binds a vCPU to a physical core or an SMT thread. It is configured in the OS and virtualisation layers.	e.cap.006
infra.com.cfg.004	Huge pages	Yes/No	The ability to manage huge pages of memory. It is configured in the OS and virtualisation layers.	i.cap.018
infra.com.cfg.005	Simultaneous multithreading (SMT)	Yes/No/Optional	SMT allows multiple execution threads to be executed on a single physical CPU core. It is configured in the OS, in addition to the hardware.	e.cap.018

Table 5-1: Virtual compute features.

Reference	Feature	Type	Description	Capabilities reference
infra.com.acc.cfg .001	IPSec acceleration	Yes/No/Optional	IPSec acceleration	e.cap.008
infra.com.acc.cfg .002	Transcoding acceleration	Yes/No/Optional	Transcoding acceleration	e.cap.010
infra.com.acc.cfg .003	Programmable acceleration	Yes/No/Optional	Programmable acceleration	e.cap.011
infra.com.acc.cfg .004	GPU	Yes/No/Optional	Hardware coprocessor	e.cap.014
infra.com.acc.cfg .005	FPGA/other acceleration H/W	Yes/No/Optional	This is non-specific hardware. These capabilities generally require hardware-dependent drivers to be injected into the workloads.	e.cap.016

Table 5-2: Virtual compute acceleration features.

5.1.2. Virtual storage profiles

Table 5-3 and Table 5-4 depict the features related to virtual storage.

Reference	Feature	Type	Description
infra.stg.cfg.001	Catalogue storage types	Yes/No	The support of storage types described in the catalogue
infra.stg.cfg.002	Storage block	Yes/No
infra.stg.cfg.003	Storage with replication	Yes/No
infra.stg.cfg.004	Storage with encryption	Yes/No

Table 5-3: Virtual storage features.

Reference	Feature	Type	Description
infra.stg.acc.cfg.001	Storage IOPS oriented	Yes/No
infra.stg.acc.cfg.002	Storage capacity oriented	Yes/No

Table 5-4: Virtual storage acceleration features.

5.1.3. Virtual networking profiles

Table 5-5 and Table 5-6 depict the features related to virtual networking.

Reference	Feature	Type	Description	Capabilities Reference
infra.net.cfg.001	Connection point interface IO virtualisation	IO virtualisation	For example, virtio1.1.
infra.net.cfg.002	Overlay protocol	Protocols	The overlay network encapsulation protocol needs to enable ECMP in the underlay to take advantage of the scale-out features of the network fabric.
infra.net.cfg.003	NAT	Yes/No	Support of network address translation.
infra.net.cfg.004	Security groups	Yes/No	The set of rules managing incoming and outgoing network traffic.
infra.net.cfg.005	Service function chaining	Yes/No	Support of service function chaining (SFC).
infra.net.cfg.006	Traffic patterns symmetry	Yes/No	Traffic patterns should be optimal, in terms of packet flow. North-south traffic must not be concentrated in specific elements in the architecture, making those critical choke-points, unless strictly necessary (for example, when NAT 1:many is required).

Table 5-5: Virtual networking features.

Reference	Feature	Type	Description	Capabilities reference
infra.net.acc.cfg.001	vSwitch optimisation	Yes/No and SW optimisation	For example, DPDK.	e.cap.019
infra.net.acc.cfg.002	SmartNIC (for HW offload)	Yes/No	HW offload	e.cap.015
infra.net.acc.cfg.003	Crypto acceleration	Yes/No		e.cap.009
infra.net.acc.cfg.004	Crypto acceleration interface	Yes/No

Table 5-6: Virtual networking acceleration features.

5.1.4. Security

For details, see section 7 Security.

5.1.5. Platform services

This section details the services that may be made available to the workloads by the Cloud Infrastructure.

Reference	Feature	Type	Description
infra.svc.stg.001	Object storage	Yes/No	Object storage service (for example, S3-compatible).

Table 5-7: Cloud Infrastructure platform services.

Platform service category	Platform service examples
Data stores/databases	Ceph, etcd, MongoDB, Redis
Streaming and messaging	Apache Kafka, Rabbit MQ
Load balancer and service proxy	Envoy, Istio, NGINX
Service mesh	Envoy, Istio
Security and compliance	Calico, cert-manager
Monitoring	Prometheus, Grafana (for visualisation), Kiali (for service mesh)
Logging	Fluentd, ElasticSearch (Elastic.io, Open Distro), ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana)
Application definition and image build	Helm
CI/CD	Argo, GitLab, Jenkins
Ingress/egress controllers	Envoy, Istio, NGINX
Network related services	CoreDNS, Istio
Coordination and service discovery	CoreDNS, etcd, Zookeeper
Automation and configuration	Ansible
Key management	Vault
Tracing	Jaeger

Table 5-7a: Service examples.

5.1.5.1. Platform services - load balancer requirements

The table below specifies a set of requirements for the load balancer platform service.

Reference	Requirement	Notes
pas.lb.001	The load balancer must support workload resource scaling.
pas.lb.002	The load balancer must support resource resiliency.
pas.lb.003	The load balancer must support scaling and resiliency in the local environment.	Local environment: within a subnet, tenant network, Availability Zone of a cloud, …
pas.lb.004	The load balancer must support OSI Level 3/4 load balancing.	Specifically, OSI Level 3 load balancing decisions on the source and destination IP addresses, and OSI Level 4 TCP port numbers.
pas.lb.005	The load balancer must, at a minimum, support round-robin load balancing.
pas.lb.006	The load balancer must create event logs with the appropriate severity levels (catastrophic, critical, and so on).
pas.lb.007	The load balancer must support monitoring of endpoints.
pas.lb.008	The load balancer must support Direct Server Return (DSR).	Other modes can also be supported, but DSR should always be supported.
pas.lb.009	The load balancer must support stateful TCP load balancing.
pas.lb.010	The load balancer must support UDP load-balancing.
pas.lb.011	The load balancer must support load balancing and the correct handling of fragmented packets.
pas.lb.012	The load balancer may support stateful SCTP load balancing.
pas.lb.013	The load balancer may support stateful M-TCP load balancing.
pas.lb.014	The load balancer may support Level 7 load balancing.	Application characteristics-based OSI Level 7 should support HTTP and HTTPS.
pas.lb.015	The L7 load balancer may support HTTP2.
pas.lb.016	The L7 load balancer may support HTTP3.
pas.lb.017	The L7 load balancer may support QUIC.

Table 5-7b: Platform services - load balancer requirements.

5.1.5.2. Platform services - log management service (LMS)

The table below specifies a set of requirements for the log management service (LMS).

Reference	Requirement	Notes
pas.lms.001	The LMS must support log management from multiple distributed sources.
pas.lms.002	The LMS must manage log rotation at configurable periods.
pas.lms.003	The LMS must manage log rotation at configurable log file status (%full).
pas.lms.004	The LMS must manage archival and retention of logs for configurable periods by different log types.
pas.lms.005	The LMS must ensure log file integrity (no changes, particularly changes that may affect the completeness, consistency, and accuracy, including event times, of the log file content).	This is covered by req.sec.mon.005: “The Prod-Platform and NonProd- Platformmust secure and protect all logs (containing sensitive information) both in-transit and at rest.”
pas.lms.006	The LMS must monitor log rotation and log archival processes.
pas.lms.007	The LMS must monitor the logging status of all the log sources.
pas.lms.008	The LMS must ensure that the clock of each logging host is synchronized to a common time source.
pas.lms.009	The LMS must support the reconfiguring of logging as needed, based on policy changes, technology changes, and other factors.
pas.lms.010	The LMS must support the documenting and reporting of anomalies in log settings, configurations, and processes.
pas.lms.011	The LMS must support the correlating of entries from multiple logs that relate to the same event.
pas.lms.012	The LMS must support the correlating of multiple log entries from a single source or multiple sources, based on logged values (for example, event types, timestamps, and IP addresses).
pas.lms.013	The LMS should support rule-based correlation.

Table 5-7c: Platform services - log management service (LMS) requirements

5.1.5.3. Platform services - monitoring service requirements

The table below specifies a set of requirements for the monitoring service (aka monitoring system).

Reference	Requirement	Notes
pas.mon.001	The monitoring service must be able to collect data generated by or collected from any resource (physical and virtual infrastructure, application, network, and so on).	Ability to monitor applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, system metrics, and infrastructure components.
pas.mon.002	The monitoring service must be able to aggregate the collected data.
pas.mon.003	The monitoring service must be able to correlate data from different systems.
pas.mon.004	The monitoring service must be able to perform active or passive monitoring, or both.
pas.mon.005	The monitoring service must support the configuration of thresholds, outside which the resource cannot function normally, for alert generation.
pas.mon.006	The monitoring service must support the configuration of alert notification media (such as email, SMS, phone, and so on).
pas.mon.007	The monitoring service must support configurable realerting after a configurable period, if the metric remains outside the threshold.
pas.mon.008	The monitoring service must support configurable alert escalations.
pas.mon.009	The monitoring service must support alert acknowledgments by disabling the future alerting of the same resource/reason.
pas.mon.010	The monitoring service must support the selective enabling and disabling of alerts by resource, category of resources, and lengths of time.
pas.mon.011	The monitoring service must publish its APIs for programmatic invocation of all monitoring service functions.
pas.mon.012	The monitoring service must itself be monitored through a logging service.
pas.mon.013	The monitoring service should be implemented for high availability to ensure the non-stop monitoring of critical infrastructure components.
pas.mon.014	The monitoring service should run separately from production services.
pas.mon.015	A failure of the monitoring of the system should not cause a failure in the monitoring service.
pas.mon.016	An inoperative monitoring service should not generate alerts about the monitored system.
pas.mon.017	The monitoring service should provide a consolidated view of the entire monitored infrastructure.	View: dashboard or report

Table 5-7d: Platform services - monitoring service requirements

5.2. Features and requirements of the Cloud Infrastructure software profiles

This section details the Cloud Infrastructure software profiles and the associated configurations for the two types of Cloud Infrastructure profiles: Basic and High Performance.

5.2.1. Virtual compute

Table 5-8 depicts the features and configurations related to virtual compute for the two Cloud Infrastructure profiles.

Reference	Feature	Type	Basic	High performance
infra.com.cfg.001	CPU allocation ratio	<value>	N:1	1:1
infra.com.cfg.002	NUMA alignment	Yes/No	N	Y
infra.com.cfg.003	CPU pinning	Yes/No	N	Y
infra.com.cfg.004	Huge pages	Yes/No	N	Y
infra.com.cfg.005	Simultaneous multithreading (SMT)	Yes/No/Optional	Y	Optional

Table 5-8: Virtual compute features and configuration for the two types of Cloud Infrastructure profiles

Table 5-9 lists the features related to compute acceleration for the high-performance profile. The table also lists the applicable Profile extensions and extra specifications that may need to be specified.

Reference	Feature	Profile-Extensions	Profile extra specs
infra.com.acc.cfg.001	IPSec acceleration	Compute-intensive GPU
infra.com.acc.cfg.002	Transcoding acceleration	Compute-intensive GPU	Video transcoding
infra.com.acc.cfg.003	Programmable acceleration	Firmware-programmable adapter	accelerator
infra.com.acc.cfg.004	GPU	Compute-intensive GPU
infra.com.acc.cfg.005	FPGA/other acceleration H/W	Firmware-programmable adapter

Table 5-9: Virtual compute acceleration features

5.2.2. Virtual storage

Table 5-10 and Table 5-11 depict the features and configurations related to virtual storage for the two Cloud Infrastructure profiles.

Reference	Feature	Type	Basic	High performance
infra.stg.cfg.001	Catalogue storage types	Yes/No	Y	Y
infra.stg.cfg.002	Storage block	Yes/No	Y	Y
infra.stg.cfg.003	Storage with replication	Yes/No	N	Y
infra.stg.cfg.004	Storage with encryption	Yes/No	Y	Y

Table 5-10: Virtual storage features and configuration for the two profiles

Table 5-11 depicts the features related to virtual storage acceleration.

Reference	Feature	Type	Basic	High performance
infra.stg.acc.cfg.001	Storage IOPS oriented	Yes/No	N	Y
infra.stg.acc.cfg.002	Storage capacity oriented	Yes/No	N	N

Table 5-11: Virtual storage acceleration features.

5.2.3. Virtual networking

Table 5-12 and Table 5-13 depict the features and configurations related to virtual networking for the two types of Cloud Infrastructure profiles.

Reference	Feature	Type	Basic	High performance
infra.net.cfg.001	Connection point interface	IO virtualisation	virtio1.1	virtio1.1*
infra.net.cfg.002	Overlay protocol	Protocols	VXLAN, MPLSoUDP, GENEVE, other	VXLAN, MPLSoUDP, GENEVE, other
infra.net.cfg.003	NAT	Yes/No	Y	Y
infra.net.cfg.004	Security group	Yes/No	Y	Y
infra.net.cfg.005	Service function chaining	Yes/No	N	Y
infra.net.cfg.006	Traffic patterns symmetry	Yes/No	Y	Y

Table 5-12: Virtual networking features and configuration for the two types of SW profiles

Note: * might have other interfaces (such as SR-IOV VFs to be directly passed to a VM or a Pod) or NIC-specific drivers on guest machines transiently allowed until mature enough solutions are available with a similar efficiency level (for example, regarding CPU and energy consumption).

Reference	Feature	Type	Basic	High performance
infra.net.acc.cfg.001	vSwitch optimisation (DPDK)	Yes/No and SW optimisation	N	Y
infra.net.acc.cfg.002	SmartNIC (for HW Offload)	Yes/No/Optional	N	Optional
infra.net.acc.cfg.003	Crypto acceleration	Yes/No/Optional	N	Optional
infra.net.acc.cfg.004	Crypto acceleration interface	Yes/No/Optional	N	Optional

Table 5-13: Virtual networking acceleration features

5.3. Cloud Infrastructure hardware profile description

The support of various workload types, each with different, and sometimes conflicting, compute, storage, and network characteristics, including accelerations and optimizations, drives the need to aggregate these characteristics as a hardware (host) profile and capabilities. A host profile is a “personality” assigned to a compute host (also known as physical server, compute host, host, node, or pServer). The host profiles and related capabilities consist of the intrinsic compute host capabilities, such as the number of CPU sockets, the number of cores per CPU, RAM, local disks and their capacity, and so on, as well as capabilities enabled in the hardware/BIOS, specialized hardware, such as accelerators, the underlay networking, and storage.

This chapter defines a simplified host, profile, and related capabilities model associated with each of the different Cloud Infrastructure hardware profile and related capabilities. The two Profiles, Profile Extensions & Flavours (also known as host profiles, node profiles, and hardware profiles), and some of their associated capabilities, are shown in Figure 5.4.

Figure 5.4 Cloud Infrastructure hardware profiles and host-associated capabilities

The profiles can be considered to be the set of Enhanced Performance Awareness (EPA)-related configurations on Cloud Infrastructure resources.

Note: In this chapter we will not list all of the EPA-related configuration parameters.

A given host can only be assigned a single host profile. A host profile can be assigned to multiple hosts. In addition to the host profile, Profiles and workload flavours, and additional capability specifications for the configuration of the host can be specified. Different cloud service providers (CSPs) may use different naming standards for their host profiles. For the profiles to be configured, the architecture of the underlying resource needs to be known.

Ref	Cloud Infrastructure resource	Type	Definition/Notes	Capabilities reference
infra.hw.001	CPU architecture	<value>	Values such as x64, ARM, and so on.	e.cap.020

The host profile properties are specified in the following subsections. The following diagram (Figure 5.5) represents a high-level abstraction of a physical server (host).

Figure 5.5 Generic model of a compute host for use in host profile configurations

5.4. Features and requirements of the Cloud Infrastructure hardware profiles

The configurations specified in this section are used to specify the hardware profile configurations for each of the Cloud Infrastructure hardware profiles depicted in Figure 5-4.

5.4.1. Compute resources

Reference	Feature	Description	Basic	High performance
infra.hw.cpu.cfg.001	Minimum number of CPU sockets	This feature specifies the minimum number of populated CPU sockets within each host (*).	2	2
infra.hw.cpu.cfg.002	Minimum number of cores per CPU	This feature specifies the number of cores needed per CPU (*).	20	20
infra.hw.cpu.cfg.003	NUMA alignment	NUMA alignment is enabled and BIOS is configured to enable NUMA.	N	Y
infra.hw.cpu.cfg.004	Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT)	SMT is enabled, allowing each core to work multiple streams of data simultaneously.	Y	Y

Table 5-14: Minimum sizing and capability configurations for general purpose servers

(*) These specifications are for general purpose servers normally located in large data centres. Servers for specialised use with the data centres or other locations, such as at edge sites, are likely to have different specifications.

5.4.1.1. Compute acceleration hardware specifications

Reference	Feature	Description	Basic	High performance	Capabilities reference
infra.hw.cac.cfg.001	GPU	GPU	N	Optional	e.cap.014
infra.hw.cac.cfg.002	FPGA/other acceleration HW	HW accelerators	N	Optional	e.cap.016

Table 5-15: Compute acceleration configuration specifications

5.4.2. Storage configurations

Reference	Feature	Description	Basic	High performance
infra.hw.stg.hdd.cfg.001*	Local storage HDD	Hard disk drive
infra.hw.stg.ssd.cfg.002*	Local storage SSD	Solid state drive	Recommended	Recommended

Table 5-16: Storage configuration specification

Note: *These are specified local storage configurations including # and capacity of storage drives.

5.4.3. Network resources

5.4.3.1. NIC configurations

Reference	Feature	Description	Basic	High performance
infra.hw.nic.cfg.001	NIC ports	Total number of NIC ports available in the host.	4	4
infra.hw.nic.cfg.002	Port speed	Port speed, in Gbps (minimum values).	10	25

Table 5-17: Minimum NIC configuration specification

5.4.3.2. PCIe configurations

Reference	Feature	Description	Basic	High performance
infra.hw.pci.cfg.001	PCIe slots	Number of PCIe slots available in the host.	8	8
infra.hw.pci.cfg.002	PCIe speed		Gen 3	Gen 3
infra.hw.pci.cfg.003	PCIe lanes		8	8

Table 5-18: PCIe configuration specifications

5.4.3.3. Network acceleration configurations

Reference	Feature	Description	Basic	High performance	Capabilities Reference
infra.hw.nac.cfg.001	Crypto acceleration	IPSec, Crypto.	N	Optional	e.cap.009
infra.hw.nac.cfg.002	SmartNIC	Offloads network functionality.	N	Optional	e.cap.015
infra.hw.nac.cfg.003	Compression		Optional	Optional
infra.hw.nac.cfg.004	SR-IOV over PCI-PT	SR-IOV	N	Optional	e.cap.013

Table 5-19: Network acceleration configuration specification