Automation for Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is the combination of technology (virtualization and automation) and discipline (a stringent way of breaking down the offered services into small blocks in order to recombine them quickly and automatically upon the user's request as well as defining standards or service catalogues to be offered. Automation is the act of implementing the control of equipment with advanced technology; usually involving electronic hardware.. The cloud infrastructure and management components take care of automatic provisioning and resource management, but as soon as legacy applications – that do not really know that they are running on a beautifully scalable environment – are involved manual administration of these applications would mean chasing an ever changing rabbit across a chameleon planet. Therefore, an automation engine could be fed IT model data and monitoring feeds directly from the cloud manager and could thus deal with the ever changing environment and keep the application automation rules up to date with the cloud components currently in use. Besides being able to spin up new server instances in the cloud, the other advantages of automation in cloud computing are- interoperability and workload redistribution . Interoperability - is about a frictionless and reliable set of standards to allow users to write once/run anywhere so they can build applications and deploy them internally to sites as Amazon.com, Rack Space .Workload redistribution -is about being able to move an existing process from one cloud to another in a seamless and relatively quick set of steps. It relies on interoperability, but it goes beyond that with a set of tools to enable users to move their workloads to the cloud environment that makes the most sense for financial, performance or other reasons. Tools are being developed to support this.

　

　

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Cloudkick is a Y Combinator-funded company with support for Amazon Web Services and Slicehost that is working on Cloudshift, a multicloud migration tool, To achieve automation we can-define services, which includes a complete virtual application stack (vApps) as well as individual servers (applications, web servers, database servers) and media (operating systems, software, database, application server, etc.) ,set service-levels: availability (uptime) guarantees, access to resources, storage speed, networking bandwidth, shares of compute resources, storage IO guarantees, backup frequency and disaster recovery requirements. Setup rules to automatically load balance and optimize resources, enabling applications to benefit from dynamic resource scheduling, uptime guarantees and disaster recovery fail-over rules, tier service-levels based on application and business priorities and establish policies for self-service access to applications and resources, allowing users to manage seamlessly within the private cloud, create catalogs of these services to allow self-service access and outline policies and permissions (user rights) to access, create and modify these services, including pre-built, ready-for-deployment virtual machines, vApps, media and software, establish prices and chargeback for these services, automate management tasks by scripting through APIs such as vSphere Management API (VIM) and vCloud Developer API. Workload automation is poised to take advantage of the cost benefits of moving workloads to the cloud. Of particular interest for datacenter managers is batch workloads which run for short periods of time but typically take up dedicated hardware, software and management resources. These workloads could be moved to the cloud and with the right workload automation solution and run book automation enabled to take full advantage of the business benefits that cloud computing offers.