We discussed about cloud-enabled and native applications and how they are hosted on underlying cloud infrastructures to accomplish service delivery. Applications are significantly functional. However, the non-functional requirements, such as application scalability, availability, security, reliability, performance/throughput, modifiability, and so on, are being used widely. That is, producing high-quality applications is a real challenge for IT professionals. There are design, development, testing, and deployment techniques, tips, and patterns to incorporate the various NFRs into cloud applications. There are best practices and key guidelines to come out with highly scalable, available, and reliable applications.

The second challenge is to setup and sustain highly competent and cognitive cloud infrastructures to exhibit reliable behavior. The combination of highly resilient, robust, and versatile applications and infrastructures leads to the implementation of highly dependable IT that meets the business productivity, affordability, and adaptivity.

Having understood the tactical and strategic significance and value, businesses are consciously embracing the pioneering cloud paradigm. That is, all kinds of traditional IT environments are becoming cloud-enabled to reap the originally expressed business, technical, and use benefits. However, the cloud formation alone is not going to solve every business and IT problem. Besides establishing purpose-specific and agnostic cloud centers, there are a lot more things to be done to attain the business agility and reliability. The cloud center operation processes need to be refined, integrated, and orchestrated to arrive at optimized and organized processes. Each of the cloud center operations needs to be precisely defined and automated in to fulfil the true meaning of IT agility. With agile and reliable cloud applications and environments, the business competency and value are bound to go up remarkably.