EDITOR’S QUESTION
Massimo Ferrari
Director, cloud management
strategy at Red Hat
Anticipating IT operations at scale is key:
CIOs should anticipate that their cloud
environments will present different kind
of challenges at different stages of its
evolution. The more a cloud grows, in
terms of infrastructure size and amount
of hosted workloads, the more complex
it will be to operate it, for example, when
the scale reaches tens of thousands of
applications, virtual machines (and, over
time, containers) and their workloads can’t
be configured and patched efficiently
in a manual way automation becomes
necessary to complete those tasks in a
timely fashion and without errors that
operators typically make.
Similarly, deploying new applications in
such a complex environment cannot be
done in traditional ways: a large cloud
usually is a very dynamic environment
where applications are provisioned
and retired at a rapid pace, and where
capacity allocation and optimal workload
placement cannot be defined by hand in
spreadsheets.
A Cloud Management Platform (CMP) is a
governance layer that allows IT organisations
to reach that operational scale that would be
impossible to manage otherwise.
A CMP [