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definitely on the higher side. Because of its tremendous impacts on
business operations, offerings, and outputs, there is a huge following
for this path-breaking technology. Key distinctions as enunciated and
enumerated by many cloud luminaries and leaders are described in the
paragraphs that follow.
3.5.18.1 Simplified and Synchronized Operations of Cloud Infrastructures
through Standard APIs is is the era of APIs. By front-ending the
virtualized infrastructure with a layer of software that provides APIs
for accessing, activating, and adapting various IT resources, any users
(business as well as technical) can easily invoke one or more APIs
and bring forth any resources into existence. A classic example here
is using the OpenStack Nova API or AWS EC2 API to provision
virtual machines running desired operating systems. From the end-
user’s perspective, as long as an API is there, it does not matter who
the provider is. e easy-to-use API is the game-changer for the IT
industry.
3.5.18.2 Instant-On IT HP has coined the concept of “Instant-on
Enterprises” and could substantiate the ideals behind it through their
noteworthy advancements in realizing highly converged infrastruc-
tures. Today everything happens quickly in a cloud environment;
hence the capability of cloud-enabled IT agility has a stronger and
more sustainable influence on the long-standing goal of business agil-
ity. Infrastructures are being consolidated, centralized, converged,
virtualized, and shared. e interconnectivity between various mod-
ules such as servers, storage, and network solutions is becoming more
accurate. Capacity planning is therefore comprehensive and compact.
Workload packaging and deployment are being automated; resource
provisioning is faster; application configurations and changes are being
enabled through highly competent tools; infrastructure management
solutions are powerful and path-breaking, the DevOps capability
is being fulfilled through a host of technologies and tools; business
processes are being provided as a service with the unprecedented
maturity and stability of automation, management, and orchestra-
tion engines; and so on. Resources are being created on-demand and
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instantly assimilated with existing resources to achieve the require-
ments of scalability and availability, and so on.
3.5.18.3 Programmable Infrastructures e concept of abstraction and
virtualization has caught up with IT infrastructures to bring in the
much-needed programmability. IT administrators gain programmatic
access to infrastructure services. e remote yet centralized monitor-
ing, measurement, management, and maintenance of geographically
distributed IT infrastructures are made possible. Real-time diagno-
sis, troubleshooting, and decommissioning of resources are seeing the
light. Several manual tasks are being automated through powerful
tools. e result is that we have optimized, extensible, and malleable
infrastructures in place to anticipate and accomplish business tasks in
a reliable and cost-effective fashion. Cloud service providers therefore
can stick to the service-level agreement (SLA) and keep their custom-
ers loyal.
3.5.18.4 Deeper Visibility and Higher Controllability By front-ending
the virtualized infrastructure with a cloud software platform, IT
administrators could monitor every action and transaction touching
the underlying physical and virtual infrastructures. is generates
massive amounts of log data and there are machine analytics plat-
forms (open-source as well as commercial grade) to capture, store,
process, and analyze in real time to emit actionable insights. is
empowerment goes a long way in providing visibility and control-
lability to administrators in keeping up with workloads and their
dependencies. Any kind of slowdown and breakdown can be judi-
ciously avoided.
3.5.18.5 Business Continuity Building on the intelligence gathered
from infrastructure data, IT administrators can now quickly ana-
lyze root cause for failures and implement remediation procedures.
Using automation, coupled with BDA, IT administrators can further
reduce the recovery time sharply by either pre-provisioning additional
capacity ahead of the failure event or rapidly deploying spare capacity
on-demand to enable quick recovery. rough pre-provisioning, fail-
ures can be minimized or eliminated, while rapid deployment helps
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THE ROLE OF CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURES
reduce the time to recover from failures. e recovery time objective
(RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), the major constituents of
any business strategy, can be substantially decreased with automation
techniques. Disaster and data recovery requirements are being accom-
plished easily in cloud environments.
3.5.18.6 Enhanced Utilization Operating the infrastructure resources
to the optimum capacity, without risking the SLAs, is every IT own-
er’s goal. Using virtualization and ingrained automation tools, IT
administrators could better leverage different hardware components.
Perfect capacity planning and resource allocation at a granular level
are the key mechanisms for improved utilization of IT infrastruc-
tures. By carving out smaller units of resources and putting them
together near the application users, an IT administrator can deftly
match the capacity needs. Any released sources can be recycled back
to the resource pool to be served for other users and uses.
3.5.18.7 Utility Computing End-users are now able to pay for the
exact amount of resource usage. By doing so, they avoid paying for
capacity that they did not use and also have the confidence that addi-
tional capacity will be available when they need it. Monitoring, bill-
ing, and charging are fully automated in cloud environments.
Owing to the increased responsiveness, assertiveness, and per-
vasiveness of information and communication technologies (ICTs)
in realizing the goals of digital living, the indisputable and incred-
ible reason behind the systematic and judicious journey toward the
smarter world, there have been a bevy of versatile transformations in
the IT field. ere is a perceptible change in the form of IT moving
from a cost center to a strategic center across all kinds of worldwide
enterprises today. A family of business augmentation, acceleration,
and automation technologies and tools and tips is being meticulously
listed out and leveraged to bring IT closer to business expectations
and to readily tackle any business changes and challenges. ere have
been different kinds of attempts in the form of IT consolidation, con-
vergence, virtualization, rationalization, standardization, simplifi-
cation, orchestration, and so on to bring in real IT optimization so
that the aims of IT agility, adaptability, and affordability could be
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accomplished to the fullest satisfaction of business executives, end-
users, and other stakeholders.
Instant deployment
Intelligent op
erations
Improved utilization
Real-time recovery
Just-in-time
provisioning
Pay-per-use
Cloud
e arrival of cloud concepts has brought tremendous changes in the
IT landscape that in turn led to realizing huge transitions in the deliv-
ery of business applications and services and in the solid enhancement
of business flexibility, productivity, and sustainability. Formally cloud
infrastructures are centralized, virtualized, automated, and shared
IT infrastructures. e utilization rate of cloud infrastructures has
gone up significantly. Still, there are dependencies curtailing the full
usage of expensive IT resources. Employing the decoupling technique
among various modules to eliminate all kinds of constricting depen-
dencies; more intensive and insightful process automation through
orchestration and policy-based configuration, operation, manage-
ment, delivery, and maintenance; and attaching external knowledge
bases are widely prescribed to achieve still more IT utilization to cut
costs remarkably. Bringing in the much- discoursedmodularity to
enable programmable IT infrastructures and extracting and central-
izing all the embedded intelligence via robust and resilient software,
distributed deployment, centralized management, and federation are
being touted as the viable and respected courses of action for attaining
the originally envisaged success. at is, creating a dynamic pool of
virtualized resources; allocating them on demand for their fullest uti-
lization; charging for their exact usage; putting unutilized resources
back into the pool; monitoring, measuring, and managing resource
performance; and so on are the hallmarks of next-generation IT
infrastructures. Precisely speaking, IT infrastructures are being soft-
ware defined to bring in much-needed accessibility, consumability,
malleability, elasticity, and extensibility.
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THE ROLE OF CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURES
On-demand IT has been the perpetual goal. All kinds of IT re -
sourcesneed to have the inherent capability of preemptively knowing
users’ as well as applications’ IT resource requirements and accordingly
fulfill them without any instruction, interpretation, and involvement
of human resources. IT resources need to be scaled up and down based
on changing needs so that the cost can be controlled. at is, perfect
provisioning of resources is the mandate. Overprovisioning raises
the pricing whereas underprovisioning is a cause for performance-
degradation worries. e cloud paradigm transparently leverages a
number of software solutions and specialized tools to provide scal-
ability of applications through resource elasticity. e expected dyna-
mism in resource provisioning and deprovisioning has to become a
core and concrete capability of clouds.
us providing right-sized IT resources (compute, storage, and
networking) for all kinds of business software solutions is the need of
the hour. Users increasingly expect their service providers’ infrastruc-
tures to deliver these resources elastically in response to their chang-
ing needs. ere is no cloud services infrastructure available today
capable of simultaneously delivering scalability, flexibility, and high
operational efficiency. Deeper automation and software-based con-
figuration, controlling, and operation of hardware resources are the
main enablers behind the vision of software-defined infrastructure
(SDI).
An SDI is an enabler of private, public, and hybrid clouds. at is,
software-defined computing, networking, and storage are the principal
components in an SDI of the future. With the ultimate flexibility and
full-fledged automation capabilities, an SDE is a vital component of
the cloud that enables data center administrators to use a single graph-
ical user interface to do everything from deploying virtual machines
to assigning storage to configuring networks, hence allowing clouds
to become more streamlined, simplified, and adaptively responsive.
ere are a few connotations such as software-defined data centers
(SDDCs), cloud-enabled data centers (CeDCs), and so on for SDEs.
Originally it was just data centers for every decent enterprise across
the globe. e next milestone is the much-published and pampered
server consolidation through virtualization. is server consolidation
results in a dynamic pool of virtual as well as bare metal compute
systems. at is, data centers have been continuously subjected to a
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