When deploying cloud infrastructure, most of the focus is applied towards compute, storage and network virtualization, but many times, the operational orchestration and automation elements are often overlooked. For any enterprise cloud deployment, a cloud operating model provides a basis for multi-cloud infrastructure by provide a consistent operational framework to drive orchestration and increase productivity.
IDC recently detailed the benefits of a cloud operating model in software defined infrastructure in a white paper titled: Enabling a Cloud Operating Model for Software Defined Infrastructure. This paper provides a detailed analysis of the role that management plays in a fully integrated software-defined infrastructure and the role that a cloud management suite has in delivering automation and orchestration in private a hybrid cloud environments.
Within the white paper, IDC also details the elements of an advanced management software suite that are key capabilities required to create and operate an enterprise cloud, including, but not limited to:
- Automation and orchestration.
- Configuration automation
- Self-service
- Visibility, observability, and reporting.
- Capacity and cost management.
- Compliance.
- Analytics-powered monitoring and troubleshooting.
- Migration.
Of course, these are all important capabilities for managing both VMs and containers through VMware vRealize when delivered within VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu which includes Tanzu Standard (Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Tanzu Mission Control). VMware Cloud Foundation is designed to help organizations optimize, control, and secure self-service hybrid clouds, providing self-service operations and multicloud automation with governance, as well as DevOps-based infrastructure delivery. With vRealize, internal IT operations, DevOps engineers, developers, and the lines of business get the environments and resources that they need faster with a public cloud–like user experience, while IT maintains security, compliance, and control.
The highlight of the paper is a customer case study based on an interview with the IDC Analyst team (Gary Chen and Steven Elliot), highlighting how the European Public Healthcare Provider who uses VMware Cloud Foundation to provide application owners quicker, more accurate VM provisioning process, which was done with vRealize Automation. Before Cloud Foundation, it would take weeks to provision a VM, but now VMs are provisioned almost right away, with consistent configurations with application automation and key metrics for uptime and performance.
IDC summarized it very well in the conclusion “The cloud operating model, cloud-native infrastructure and applications, and software-defined infrastructure are all critical ingredients of a successful strategy. Aligning and connecting people, process, and technologies across layers of the IT and business organizations is an important success factor for cloud deployments. For most businesses, the technology architecture is now their business architecture.”
You can download the IDC white paper here and please provide any comments on this blog or the @VMwareVCF twitter channel.
