Level No. 3: Cloud Foundations
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Level No. 3: Cloud foundations
At this stage, you'll need to begin establishing the foundation for
an application architecture that will support what is likely to become
an explosion in volume and scale. The reality is that virtualization
lowers the barriers to application deployment. By reducing deployment
friction, levels of demand and volume of application workloads can go
through the roof.
At this stage, you should have a platform in place for managing the
life cycle management of your virtualized applications; ensuring the
consistency, repeatability and maintainability of virtualized
application images, and providing a foundation for managing a vast
increase in virtual machines and application images that must be
managed.
Don't skip this stage. While you might be tempted to go right from
experimentation to full-scale application deployment, you could create
new problems if you don't have a solid foundation of procedures,
policies and tools. Take your experimental applications and roll them
out to a broader group of pilot users in the organization. Work through
the process of requisitioning, provisioning and decommissioning
applications on demand. Use your life cycle management system to
create, configure and maintain virtualized applications. Get
comfortable with all this before going on to Level 4.
Level No. 4: Cloud advancement
In Level 4, you either need to build your own internal cloud or
commit to a commercially-available cloud. You're now ready for
full-scale cloud deployment, albeit without some of the automation
you'll see in Level 5.
Your application infrastructure should be solid at this stage and
implemented across the organization. Get your virtualized applications
into production, along with the processes, policies and procedures that
you established in Level 3. Fine-tune and tweak them as you go along
but, if your preparation work was good, these changes should be
minimal.
Take a moment to sit back and congratulate yourself and your team
for your accomplishments to date. Enjoy the view from the clouds!
