3.1 VMware Powered Cloud Requirements
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the key components of a cloud are on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service.
A cloud platform starts with virtual infrastructure. Virtual infrastructure enables the agility and efficiency required to meet the characteristics of cloud computing. The cloud platform offers automated end-to-end delivery of services to end users, which is why workflow automation and orchestration are included as part of the VMware cloud solutions.
VMware powered cloud solutions follow these basic NIST requirements:
• The cloud platform must be built on a pooled, virtual infrastructure. Pools include CPU and memory resources, plus storage, networking, and associated services.
• The cloud platform must provide application mobility between clouds, allowing the consumer to enter and leave the cloud easily with existing workloads. The ability to use existing consumer tools to migrate workloads to or from the cloud is highly desirable. Mobility of workloads between clouds requires cross-cloud resource management.
• The cloud platform must be open and interoperable, allowing the consumption of cloud resources over open, Internet-standard protocols. Access to cloud resources does not require any other specific network protocols or clients.
• The cloud platform must be a secure, trusted location for running cloud consumer workloads.
• Cloud consumers must have the option and capability to protect their cloud-based workloads from data loss.
• Cloud consumers must not be responsible for maintaining any part of the shared infrastructure and do not need to interact with the cloud provider to maintain the infrastructure. They are not responsible for storage and network maintenance, ongoing cloud infrastructure patches, or business continuity activities. The cloud must be able to run high availability workloads, and any faults occurring in the cloud infrastructure m be transparent to cloud consumers.