Isolated/distributed application use case

This is the second most requested feature by enterprises. A single pane of glass for provisioning the resources in the cloud. This led to the creation of Cloud Management Platforms. 

While they are called management platforms, one of the most important features they provide is provisioning. The life cycle services they support start with provisioning. CMPs also provide an API of their own, which allows the enterprises to communicate with the CMPs programmatically, thereby integrating it with other enterprise applications: 

The APIs that are used to connect to the CMP itself are normally called Northbound APIs and the API calls being made to the various cloud platforms are dubbed Southbound APIs. 

The APIs could be of many types, but mainly, RESTful APIs are used in the cloud. There are several CMPs on the market as we have discussed, each of them have a specialization and a reason to exist. It's a good idea to compare these when choosing the right one...