Summary
- The cloud software stack enables the provisioning, monitoring, and metering of virtual user "resources" on top of a cloud service provider's infrastructure.
- Cloud middleware is the overarching platform that coordinates all of the different cloud services and allows them to be accessed as services by users.
- Provisioning on the cloud refers to the creation of different resources on top of the physical infrastructure. A provisioning system deals with identity and cost management, along with scheduling resources.
- Metering is an extremely challenging task on clouds. It requires tracking the utilization of network, storage IOPS, disk, and compute capacity, by thousands or millions of concurrent users and mapping into different costs.
- Orchestration and automation are the processes that enable cloud service providers to operate at scale, by running workflows and creating environments and configurations without manual intervention.
- OpenStack is an open-source cloud stack implementation that contains services for user authentication, provisioning, management, metering, compute, and storage, among others.