Embracing the Self-Service Cloud

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Arthur Cole.

Of all the benefits that cloud computing brings to knowledge workers, none is more intriguing than self service. Sure, scalability, flexibility and lower costs are great for the enterprise, but if you are a data consumer, nothing compares to the feeling that you can get whatever you want, whenever you want it, with no questions asked other than “What is your credit card number?”

For DevOps teams in particular, self-service is one of the primary drivers of both public and private cloud infrastructure, say Red Hat’s Malcolm Herbert and Roger Nunn. Under the old regime, resource provisioning was slow, complicated and rarely met project requirements…

This, in turn, led to diminished productivity and a failure to truly leverage the enormous investment that the enterprise had made in increasingly cumbersome and complex data infrastructure. Self service (and, this being Red Hat, open source-based self service) allows resources to be brought up in minutes and lends support for a fully automated DevOps process in which developers can concentrate on actual development, rather than environment building and maintenance…

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