This chapter briefs you on cloud service architectures. The chapter includes the following sections:
- Cloud benefits and challenges
- VMware solutions to overcome different cloud challenges
- VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture
- Overview of private, public, and hybrid clouds
- Overview of vCloud Air, AWS, and the IBM Cloud
Readers will be able to design elastic IT infra capabilities and set up a basic application hosting and DevOps environment with VMware components after going through this book. You will be able to install and configure all the building blocks to get the benefits of VMware SDDC components in an on-premises private cloud, a public cloud such as IBM or AWS, or a mix of both—a hybrid cloud.