Planning

Because you have options for on-premise or off-premise hosting with OpenStack reference architecture, your planning process should fit into your normal business operations. However, building a private cloud may offer some surprising juxtapositions from your normal operations. Let's explore these comparisons between traditional infrastructure management and planning and private cloud planning and management.

Building a Private Cloud

Building a private cloud presents a shift from a model where everything is customized to one of standardization achieving higher levels of scalability, elasticity with your existing on-premise systems. Planning is tantamount to the success of this build process.

Traditional management of information technology conjures images of static bindings between processes, applications, and infrastructure, a brittle set of links where breakage occurs often enough to be expected. Change is carefully planned, even with it's own change management systems and processes because introducing change is risky, manual, and slow. You also see heterogeneous elements and processes across silos in business units, divisions, and other organizational structures. Management software executes to the lowest common denominator, which is neither strategic nor elastic and it's certainly not scalable.

With an opposing set of plans, we can examine private cloud management. You can easily envision dynamic relationships across all layers of the technology stack with a cloud in place. Change is constant, expected, and automated with massive standardization and high-level abstraction layers. Your day-to-day is automated; management tools should focus on higher-order tasks, not the mundane.