Cloud management and automation

Basic computing resources are compute, storage and network. Virtualisation in data centres has significantly reduced the provisioning time to deploy computing resources from weeks to hours or even minutes [1]. However, data centre virtualisation in itself is not enough for building a cloud-based infrastructure. Without software to manage virtual infrastructure, it will result in virtual resource sprawl that can quickly use up the underlying physical infrastructure. Moreover, cloud-based infrastructure is built not only on virtual infrastructure, but also on physical infrastructure which also needs to be managed and automated. Therefore, there is a need to have software for managing and automating cloud-based infrastructure both virtual and physical resources. In this paper, the main modules of cloud management and automation software and the interaction between those modules are explained and discussed.