Why you need a cloud management platform

I put this post up on the Red Hat OpenStack blog. If you haven't checked this blog out, give it a look and consider subscribing. 

Cloud infrastructure and cloud management. As an industry, we conflate these two things far too often.

This is understandable up to a point. Cloud computing architectures are relatively new and new architectural approaches often involve figuring out how functions are best partitioned and how they relate to each other. The process tends to be pragmatic; that’s how the networking stack first developed. That terminology is often morphing and inconsistently applied (innocently or otherwise) doesn’t help matters.

The overall building blocks of the private and hybrid cloud stack have now crystallized to a significant degree. The boundaries of these blocks aren’t hard-edged of course; there’s always overlap in the management space given that basic functions tend to come built-in even if they’re superseded at scale or for more complex requirements. But we’re at a point where we can describe the relationship of a cloud platform such as OpenStack to cloud management platforms (CMP)s like CloudForms that shouldn’t be too controversial.

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