There are a number of noteworthy improvements and improvisations in the fields of information and communication technology (ICT) in the recent past. These continuous and consistent advancements have a direct and decisive impact on business offerings, operations, and outputs. Worldwide business enterprises, service providers, product vendors, government organizations, academic institutions, etc. are being sagaciously and strategically empowered through the distinct ICT capabilities. Especially, the role and responsibility of information technology (IT) is consistently on the rise for producing and sustaining next-generation business establishments. Precisely speaking, business acceleration and augmentation get fluently fulfilled through IT. Therefore, IT is being widely pronounced and presented as the best enabler of businesses. All kinds of business needs such as agility, affordability, adaptivity, customer propensity and delight, business productivity and expansion, etc. are being provided and performed through the growing list of innovations in the enigmatic IT domain. Cloud computing is the recent phenomenon in the IT domain bringing forth a number of crucial innovations, disruptions, and transformations for businesses and people. The cloud idea has permeated deeply and decisively and is being touted as the one-stop IT solution for all kinds of business needs. The cloud journey started a decade back and is steadily growing to bring in desired automation for businesses. This chapter is specially allocated for conveying the humble beginning, the sustained growth of the cloud idea, and the benefits for institutions, individuals, and innovators.
TopIntroduction
Definitely the cloud journey is on the fast track. The cloud idea got originated and started to thrive from the days of server virtualization. physical machines (bare metal (BM) servers) are being systematically virtualized in order to have multiple virtual /logical machines, which are provisioned dynamically and kept in ready state to deliver sufficient and on-demand coarse-grained resources (compute, storage and network) for optimally running any software application. Accordingly, the fine-grained resources are typically memory and storage capacity, processing capability, input/output (I/O) power, etc. That is, a physical machine can be empowered to run multiple and heterogeneous applications through the aspect of virtualization, which is being termed as the finest abstraction mechanism.
Different operating systems (OSes) can be run on a single and same machine to accommodate disparate applications. Resultantly, the utilization of expensive compute machines is steadily going up. Further on, the much-anticipated IT agility, adaptivity and affordability through such virtualization mechanisms are also being realized with ease. It is not only partitioning of physical machines in any data center towards having hundreds of virtual machines in order to fulfil the IT requirements of business activities but also clubbing hundreds of such virtual/logical machines together programmatically brings forth a large-scale virtual environment for running high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Precisely speaking, the virtualization tenet is leading to the realization of cheaper supercomputing capability in an on-demand fashion. There are other crucial upgrades being brought in by the indomitable virtualization feature and we will write them too in this book in detail.
This chapter, specially prepared for telling all about the praiseworthy journey of the cloud idea, details and describes the nitty-gritty of next-generation cloud centers. The motivations, the key advantages, and the enabling tools and engines along with other relevant details are being neatly and nicely illustrated there. A software defined cloud environment (SDCE) is an additional abstraction layer that ultimately defines a complete data center. This software layer presents the resources of the data center as pools of virtual and physical resources to host and deliver software applications to their subscribers and users. A modern SDCE is extremely nimble and supple in order to artistically support the varying business requirements. SDCE is, therefore, a collection of virtualized IT resources (server machines, storage appliances, and networking solutions) that can be scaled up or down as required and can be deployed as needed in a number of distinct ways. There are three key components making up SDCEs
The trait of software enablement of different hardware systems has pervaded into other domains so that we hear and read about software-defined protection, etc. There are several useful resources produced by highly accomplished and acclaimed cloud evangelists, exponents and experts in the web on this key trend.
TopReflecting The Cloud Journey
The prime objective of the hugely popular cloud paradigm is to realize highly organized and optimized IT environments for enabling business automation, acceleration, and augmentation. Most of the enterprise IT environments across the globe are bloated, closed, inflexible, static, complex, and expensive. The brewing business and IT challenges are therefore how to make IT elastic, extensible, programmable, dynamic, modular, and cost-effective. Especially with the worldwide businesses are cutting down their IT budgets gradually year after year, the enterprise IT team has left with no other option other than to embark on a meticulous and measured journey to accomplish more with less through a host of pioneering and promising technological solutions. Organizations are clearly coming to the conclusion that business operations can run without any hitch and hurdle with less IT resources through effective commoditization, consolidation, centralization, compartmentalization (virtualization and containerization), federation, and rationalization of various IT solutions (server machines, storage appliances, and networking components). Thus, IT automation and optimization processes are getting immense support from IT and business leaders.