Service provisioning and automation in the cloud

The cloud has the potential of turning IT infrastructures into truly powerful agile platforms. However, to achieve this, a new level of automation and configuration management is required. Virtual machine construction automation, using factory services, is an important first pillar in achieving reproducibility of virtual machines and artefacts construction. Further, services provisioning (i.e. the ability to instantiate and configure a set of VMs together to deliver a complete service) is the next pillar towards a more flexible infrastructure. Once these basic concepts are in place, self-provisioning, dynamic provisioning and auto-scale can be deployed.  The result reminds us of devops objectives where all stakeholders (e.g. developers, system administrators, quality assurance and business people) are part of the same process.

In this presentation, I will attempt to present the basic concepts behind automation and service provisioning in the cloud. I will also illustrate this using SlipStream, an image factory and service provisioning service, developed and commercialised by SixSq. I will also illustrate my message using concrete examples, both in public and private clouds, on scientific and commercial applications.