Cross-cloud infrastructure automation

Before we can start thinking about automation itself, we need to virtualize all of our components in IT. Automation simply doesn't work if we have to drag physical devices into a data center – unless we have robots or drones to do that. So, it starts with virtualization, and this is exactly why companies such as VMware still play such an important role in the cloud arena. Their software-defined data center (SDDC) concept is basically the blueprint for building clouds. We have to virtualize the full stack: compute, storage, and networks.

Only virtualized entities can be stored in a repository, and from there programmatically provisioned on-demand. However, we want this to be truly multi-cloud, hence the interoperability of these virtualized components is key in automation.

Virtualization is the starting point, but we want it to be truly agnostic and cross-platform. Then we'll find that a lot of systems are still very dependent...