There’s a dark green, rather gelatinous and essentially thixotropic hand-cleaning product called Swarfega that has been marketed in the UK for many years. This is the kind of thing that will shift grease and oil if you happen to have been rebuilding a car engine,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], changing your oil or even just fitting a bicycle tyre.
Swarfega has absolutely nothing to do with enterprise cloud-management as such, but if you will excuse the metaphor, the time to talk about getting our hands dirty with the mechanics of the cloud has arrived.
But what processes does enterprise cloud-management really involve,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]?
To answer this question you had better get used to three words: provisioning, monitoring and scaling. These are just about the three most descriptive “action verbs” for the cloud.
For want of a more comprehensive list, let’s try to list some of the real actions involved inside the enterprise cloud mechanic’s workshop as they bid to try and manage applications across private, public and hybrid clouds.
First up is the implementation of automation controls. This work is undertaken to monitor data flows and identify where capacity is running to plan or where it may need to be flagged as an alert so that additional processing and/or storage resources can be implemented.
Then there's the need to focus on the integrity and the security of that data. This means implementing new security controls upon applications and data that the traditional (ie non-cloud) software application developer would not have prioritised,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych].
To put it another way, cloud management is all about service management; enterprise cloud management professionals are going to have to combine a lot of services together. And these services will come in externally from various third parties including a firm’s main hosting supplier and it’s not necessarily going to be a simple jigsaw to fit together.
Cloud management is all about service management

There are two other issues to consider:
Governance - usage governance and compliance at every level forms a crucial part of the cloud mechanic’s role. Who is using what? What data lives where? Where is data being processed and how is it being transmitted.
Application provisioning and scaling - as part of the cloud utilisation monitoring process, the mechanic needs to grasp application configuration management controls to be able to ramp (sorry, we mean scale) apps up or down as the business requirement demands.
The problem is that cloud hosting providers don’t seem to want to talk about these mechanics,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]. They want us to feel warm and cosy under their “support” layer so that we don’t have to worry. Don't believe me,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]? Try hitting Google for terms like “what does a cloud developer do” or “how does enterprise cloud management work”,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]. Good luck with that.
Cloud hosting providers don’t seem to want to talk about these mechanics

This is not good. We need to know how things work because we are human beings. Even if we do hand over all the controls to our cloud provider of choice, we want to know more about what’s going on in the workshop zone so that our own in-house IT staff can integrate with cloud channels as effectively as possible.
This is the nature of modern consumerism ie we want information before we buy and while we buy. This ethos extends to the cloud model and people are going to start to ask questions before their shiny new cloud service is in the hands of the mechanics.
Now, what's the cloud equivelent of that low whistle and "It's gonna cost you ..."?

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