Cloud computing is a paradigm shift in the IT industry similar to the displacement of local electric generators with the electric grid, providing utility computing, and it is changing the nature of competition within the computer industry. There are over a hundred companies that claim they can provide cloud services. However, in most cases, they discuss server provisioning or data center automation.

Many leading IT vendors, such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Cisco, to name a few, believe that cloud computing is the next logical step in controlling IT resources, as well as a primary means to lower total cost of ownership. More than just an industry buzzword, cloud computing promises to revolutionize the way IT resources are deployed, configured, and managed for years to come. Service providers stand to realize tremendous value from moving toward this “everything as a service” delivery model. By expanding and using their infrastructure as a service, instead of dealing with a number of disparate and incompatible silos or the common single-tenant hosting and colocation model, service providers can offer high value to their customers.

This book provides a practical approach for building an architecture for providing virtualized/ cloud services and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) specifically. Based on our experiences of working with many industry-leading management software vendors and system integrators, we have provided the most comprehensive knowledge that details how to manage the cloud architecture and provide cloud services. This book details management steps with practical example use cases and best practices to build a cloud that can be used by cloud consumers and providers.