Operations, Management, and Orchestration in the Cloud

In the first section of this chapter we discuss the evolution of the concept of orchestration in the IT industry – where the concept was actually born at the turn of the century. In the second section, we review the discipline of network and operations management, with emphasis on the evolution of the operations support systems. Network management is used both in the enterprise and telecommunications industries, but naturally it originated in the telecom world. In the context of this discussion we will also review several widely implemented standards. The third section of the chapter synthesizes the above concepts in the context of Cloud, where hosted services (along with the appropriate orchestration tools) have been offered to an enterprise by the Cloud provider. As might be expected, there is not much in the way of history here – let alone standards – but the history is being made right now, at the time of this writing, and it is happening very fast with multiple open‐source initiatives! We do describe, as an example, the Amazon CloudFormation services, which have become the benchmark of the industry as a segue to the OpenStack orchestration. The fourth and last section of this chapter deals with the subject of identity and access management, the foundation for ensuring security.