BACKGROUND

The present disclosure relates to the operation of a cloud service.

BACKGROUND OF THE RELATED ART

Enterprises naturally desire to possess an IT infrastructure that is aligned with and supportive of their business requirements and objectives. To achieve this goal, many enterprises are increasingly relying upon a private cloud infrastructure. A private cloud is a type of cloud computing that delivers similar advantages as a public cloud, including scalability and self-service. Unlike public clouds, which deliver services to multiple organizations, a private cloud is dedicated to a single organization and is under the control of that organization.

Unfortunately, private cloud infrastructures are costly to build and maintain, which is true regardless of whether the measure of the cost is based on time, resources, or money. This cost is in part due to IT organizations generally not being able to cope with the increased complexity typical of private cloud infrastructures.

BRIEF SUMMARY

Some embodiments provide one or more non-transitory machine-readable storage mediums storing one or more sequences of program instructions for operating a first cluster of servers, the program instructions being configured to be executable by one or more processors of the first cluster of servers to perform operations, the operations comprising: maintaining a shared database that stores, for each of a plurality of cloud service consumers, user interface data that describes an appearance of a user interface for the cloud service consumer, wherein each server in the first cluster can read and write to the shared database; receiving, from a customer computer, a request to access services of an identified cloud service consumer among the plurality of cloud service consumers, wherein the customer computer is associated with a customer of the identified cloud service consumer; retrieving the user interface data of the identified cloud service consumer from the shared database; retrieving, from a second cluster of servers maintained by the identified cloud service consumer, user data required in response to the request; and providing the user interface data of the identified cloud service consumer and the user data to the customer computer.

Some embodiments provide a method for operating a first cluster of servers, comprising: maintaining a shared database that stores, for each of a plurality of cloud service consumers, user interface data that describes an appearance of a user interface for the cloud service consumer, wherein each server in the first cluster can read and write to the shared database; receiving, from a customer computer, a request to access services of an identified cloud service consumer among the plurality of cloud service consumers, wherein the customer computer is associated with a customer of the identified cloud service consumer; retrieving user interface data from the shared database; retrieving from a second cluster of servers maintained by the identified cloud service consumer, user data required in response to the request; and providing the user interface of the identified cloud service consumer and the user data to the customer computer.

Some embodiments provide one or more non-transitory machine-readable storage mediums storing one or more sequences of program instructions for operating a first cluster of servers, the program instructions being configured to be executable by one or more processors of the first cluster of servers to perform operations comprising: maintaining a shared database that stores, for each of a plurality of cloud service consumers, user interface data that describes an appearance of a user interface for the cloud service consumer, wherein each server in the first cluster can read and write to the shared database; receiving, from each of a plurality of customer computers, a request to access services of an identified cloud service consumer among the plurality of cloud service consumers, wherein each of the customer computers is associated with a customer of one or more of the cloud service consumers; retrieving, for each request, user interface data from the shared database and providing the user interface of the identified cloud service consumer to a web browser on the customer computer from which the request was received; retrieving, for each request, user data of the customer associated with the customer computer from which the request was received; and providing, for each request, the retrieved user data to the web browser on the customer computer from which the request was received, wherein the user data of the customer is retrieved from a separate cluster of servers maintained by the identified cloud service consumer that was identified in the request.

