Six Must-Have Cloud Management Features

Grazed from Wired. Author: Nick Kephart.

From technology startups to multinationals, cloud computing has arrived, and the change is evident. According to Gartner, nearly 20% of companies are using cloud computing for most of their production applications.Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is already a $6 billion market and it’s growing nearly 50% per year. The popularity of IaaS means that more applications and services are being delivered via the cloud by an ever­expanding group of business units, teams, developers, and systems administrators.

IaaS consumers are now looking to cloud management platforms to help manage their growing portfolio of cloud applications. A cloud management platform enables organizations to deploy, manage, monitor, and control applications across public and private clouds ­ ensuring that companies can achieve both agility and cost savings. Here are six key capabilities you should look for in a cloud management platform:…

1. Simplify Complexity

One of the main reasons that IaaS has been such a huge hit is flexibility. IaaS consumers can choose instance sizes, operating systems, databases, application frameworks, and a laundry list of other attributes. They can modify specific instances by altering configurations, boot sequences, and cron jobs. With all this customization comes the very complexity that many are trying to escape by moving away from traditional datacenters. Effective cloud management gives you the customization required for IaaS to be successful along with management tools versioning, source control, and configuration management ­ to keep it all under control…

Read more from the source @ http://www.wired.com/insights/2012/11/six-must-have-cloud-management-features/