Cloud infrastructure management encompasses the processes, procedures, toolsets, and methods used to manage and control all aspects that make up cloud management; things like virtual machines, storage, networks, and resources hosted in it. Cloud infrastructure management allows organizations to fully utilize cloud computing while still being able to control, govern, and have visibility into their IT assets.

One of the primary services of cloud infrastructure management is resource provisioning and allocation. Resource provisioning and allocation means that IT needs to allocate computing resources, such as allocating of virtual machines or storage capacity or network bandwidth. As applications and services in a cloud environment are dynamic, it is important for organizations to allocated resources in an efficient manner. Organizations can effectively ensure that they have the optimum amount of resources available and will limit underutilization or overprovisioning.

Another extremely important part of cloud infrastructure management is Monitoring and Optimizing. Organizations that can continuously monitor their cloud resources will be able to monitor performance, identify any bottleneck, monitor security threats, and make reasonable decisions in the future regarding resource allocation. Organizations need to monitor factors such as CPU Utilization, Network Latency, Storage Utilization, and so on, in order to ensure optimum performance and availability.

Security is the primary concern when it’s time to manage their cloud infrastructure, and organizations must put strict controls in place to protect the data, applications, and to protect their infrastructure from threats and breaches. This includes access control, encryption tools, vulnerability assessments, and regular audits to have high levels of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their information assets.

What Is Cloud Infrastructure Management (CIM)?

Cloud infrastructure management means managing and controlling all components and resources of a cloud computing (a.k.a. cloud) environment; these components usually include hardware, software, networking protocols, storage technologies, virtualization platforms, and the virtualized virtual services that lie below them. Management is necessary to maintain optimal performance, scaling, security, and cost efficiency of cloud services.

Cloud infrastructure management involves the assigning and management of the resources necessary to support the cloud-based applications and services, such as virtual machines, storage volumes, databases, load balancers, and other infrastructure components. Additional management duties may involve capacity planning, resource allocation, and performance optimization to satisfy user, application, and service demands.

The primary benefit of cloud infrastructure management is that it can allocate more, or fewer, resources as the demand changes, allowing organizations to easily accommodate changing workloads while streamlining costs in a more efficient manner. Cloud infrastructure management also assures availability and fault tolerance since resources can be allocated or re-allocated dynamically to assist in ensuring service continuity.

Types of Cloud Infrastructure Management

Many forms of cloud infrastructure management exist, each meant for different needs. Let’s explore some key types:

Public Cloud Infrastructure Management

Public cloud infrastructure management is the most common type of cloud infrastructure management. In public cloud infrastructure, third-party service providers (e.g. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform) manage and provide users with cloud infrastructure resources. These service providers help with every aspect of infrastructure management, including server maintenance, security updates, and scaling needs. Users access the resources on demand, and they only pay for what they use, while having very limited infrastructure management responsibilities. Advantages of public cloud infrastructure include greater scalability, flexibility, and cost-effective options for organizations of any size.

Private Cloud Infrastructure Management

Private cloud infrastructure management describes the control, security, and customization options available in an infrastructure dedicated solely to an organization. In private cloud infrastructure, the organization owns and maintains its cloud infrastructure, either on-premises or hosted in data centers. By optimizing resource allocation and monitoring performance features, private cloud infrastructure helps organizations with compliance to regulations and policies under industries that have strict needs for safeguarding sensitive data, while also mitigating challenges of questionable privacy in public clouds. Though private cloud infrastructure remains typically slower to appear as the trendiest option as compared to public cloud, it likely remains more pertinent for organizations that favor the benefits of control, security, and customization.

Managing Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures

Hybrid cloud infrastructure management incorporates public and private cloud environments so that organizations can leverage both. Businesses can keep their traditional on-premise infrastructure as well as use cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP, offering cloud services while benefiting from interoperability.

Hybrid cloud infrastructure management is all about giving companies options for where their workloads run regardless of performance, cost, security, or compliance. Cloud infrastructure and support options provide flexibility for scaling workloads, reducing costs, running critical applications on-prem, while hosting less intensive workloads in the public cloud. While the ability to scale infrastructure in response to public cloud workloads may diminish the usefulness of the cloud option, a public cloud-hosting service will likely always be less restrictive than purchasing storage/compute capabilities that may only be used intermittently.

Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Management

Multi-cloud infrastructure management means managing a number of cloud environments from multiple cloud service providers. By using multiple cloud providers, organizations are not limited by one vendor’s solutions, therefore organizations can take advantage of each vendor’s competitive pricing, functionality, architecture, and operational management systems while maximizing interoperability, tracking, automation, resilience, and disaster recovery activities by distributing workloads across a number of clouds. Ultimately organizations are also able to exercise flexibility, independence, and control.

Managing Edge Cloud Infrastructure Management

The management of edge cloud infrastructure involves managing computing resources at the edge of a network, where they exist in close proximity to the source data source. This helps to minimize latency and enhance performance for applications dependent on real-time processing or needing low latency communication. Edge cloud infrastructure management involves the deployment and management of edge devices and orchestrating processing/storage of data at the edge – this is particularly important in use cases for IoT devices, autonomous vehicles, content delivery networks, etc. And how does Cloud Infrastructure Work?

How does Cloud Infrastructure Management Work?

Key factors involved in managing cloud infrastructure and the processes facilitating them:

Virtualization

Cloud infrastructure management (not including virtualization) is highly reliant on virtualization technology. Virtualization allows for the creation of multiple virtual machines (VMs) on one physical server, successfully maximizing the use of resources while abstracting the physical components necessary for an application to run and allowing it to work without regard for any underlying physical server requirements.

Resource Allocation

Cloud infrastructure management dynamically allocates computing resources. Administrators can assign virtualized CPU, memory, storage space, and network bandwidth resources based on the requirements of applications or users. This dynamic allocation enables optimal use of resources and utilization while helping applications run more effectively with adequate resources.

Automation

Automation is an essential aspect of cloud infrastructure management. To automate is to use tools and scripts to automate routine tasks such as provisioning VMs, managing storage capacity, or configuring network settings. Automation lessens human error while improving efficiency; this allows administrators to devote their energy to more complex issues.

Monitoring and Performance Management

Cloud infrastructure management entails consistently monitoring resources and performance data. Monitoring tools that monitor usage, traffic, performance, and bottlenecks can help monitor potential capacity needs as well as how and where to distribute workloads effectively which can improve performance, and manage resources efficiently. Performance management entails optimizing infrastructure which will support better user experiences.

Security and Compliance

Cloud infrastructure management includes reliable security, access, and data protection with a combination of stringent controls, including physical firewalls; access controls, such as identity authentication measures and authorization access restrictions; and encryption technology along with intrusion detection systems or methods to manage unauthorised access, data protection, or privacy breaches from outside sources. Maintaining compliance with typical applicable standards and regulation is just as essential in cloud infrastructure management, as they also minimize/diminish violations to data privacy; however, industry standards and regulations tend to tend to add to the strictness of the controls.

Disaster Recovery and Backup

Cloud infrastructure management includes in planning, and implementing disaster recovery, and back up plans to maintain operations for you, your teams, and customers should there be a natural disaster, system failure or an unforeseeable incident. Regular backup processes are essential in reducing your exposure to data loss recovery, and speed of recovery framework.

Cost Optimization

To manage cloud infrastructure effectively, it’s about cost optimization without sacrificing performance. A cloud administrator monitors the levels of resource consumption and implements measures to remove waste and reduce spend by rightsizing virtual machines, using auto-scaling to scale resources based on demand, or taking advantage of cloud service provider pricing models.

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Management

As organizations move towards multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategies and operational models, it is necessary for the administrator to manage infrastructure in more than one cloud provider environment. Cloud infrastructure management tools and platforms allow administrators to ingest the resources consumed by cloud service providers ensuring consistent management, interoperability, and integration between the environments.

Scalability and Elasticity

Cloud infrastructure management creates the ability to manage cloud resources with scalability and elasticity. Scalability refers to the ability to add, or take away resources based on the demand that changes. Elasticity extends beyond this by allowing multiple allocations of the cloud resource based on real-time demand changes. This dynamic allocation of cloud resources allows for sudden demand peaks without degradation of performance for applications.

Continuous Improvement

When managing cloud infrastructure, continuous improvement is essential if you want your management to remain useful. Administrators should always be reviewing performance indicators, keeping an eye on new technologies, and exploring possibilities for improvements to keep up with changes, and apply best practices to cloud management.

Pros and Cons of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure as Code(IaC) is a developing approach that allows for infrastructure resources management using machine-readable configuration files, as opposed to manual settings procedures. Given its many advantages, IaC has been widely adopted.

Pros of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure as Code has inherent advantages over traditional methods, including the ability to provide automation and consistency, scaling and flexibility, version control working collaboratively and time and cost savings efficiencies:

Automation and Consistency

The generous advantages of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) begins with the ability to automate the infrastructure provisioning and configuration process where traditional infrastructure management relies on manual, error-prone tasks which leads to unpredictable inconsistencies and deployment failures. With IaC, organizations provide their requirements in Code to automate provisioning and configuration with lower human intervention, reduced human error rates, and elevated consistency across multiple environments.

Using IaC provides organizations with a dependable method of provisioning infrastructure. Infrastructure resources can be provisioned dependably, across different environments including development, testing, staging, and production, to limit configuration drift, and maintain an ideal state for all infrastructure items. Additionally, automation also provides the ability to manage infrastructure rapidly, so organizations can scale out to match fluctuating application and service needs.

Scalability and Flexibility

Infrastructure as Code gives organizations a scalable method for infrastructure management that can programmatically define and manage resources allowing for scaling infrastructure by changing Code rather than provisioning resources consistently by hand.

IaC provides organizations with flexibility when managing infrastructure. Using code-based definitions to shape their infrastructure it allows organizations to change their configuration quickly, remove or add resources based on needs, and modify parameters quickly and iteratively based on changing business conditions. Furthermore, IaC’s open architecture platform allows teams to be more agile to respond quickly to changing business conditions – whether scaling their resources at peak usage times or adapting infrastructure changes for new product feature releases – and provides teams the agility to respond quickly.

Version Control and Collaboration

IaC provides organizations, in all its glory, the advantages of version control in infrastructure management. It gives organizations infrastructure configuration files as Code. They can think of them just like source code files and be able to use Git as an efficient version control system to track changes, manage revisions, effectively collaborate on infrastructure code review/rollbacks, create audit trails, and collaborate on overlapping infrastructure code projects in an orderly manner.

Version control makes team collaboration easier. It reduces conflicts and improves communication since it, inherently, documents changes and allows tracking of communication related to infrastructure changes and discussions related to those changes. In addition to this, version control allows organizations to introduce best software engineering practices such as code reviews, continuous integration testing, and automated testing into infrastructure management which provides consistent quality and reliability during deployments.

Cost Savings and Efficiency

IaC tends to create cost savings and efficiency by reducing manual work, streamlining procedures, and utilizing resources more efficiently. Because IaC supports automation, it allows organizations to significantly reduce the time spent provisioning and managing infrastructure resources, therefore freeing up valuable time for IT teams and removing the human errors that result in costly downtime and/or security breaches.

IaC also allows organizations to optimize resource provisioning. Using IaC, requirements can be assigned rather than imposed, plus they can be provisioned or de-provisioned in real-time, which supports organizations in being more efficient and cost-effective. Furthermore, by treating infrastructure as Code tools organizations have the potential to leverage continuous integration and delivery processes, which supports faster times to deployment that enhances the time-to-market and improves the competitive advantage. Cons of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Disadvantages of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Some disadvantages of Infrastructure as Code (IaC):

Learning Curve and Complexity

A major barrier to the consumption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the level of complexity and learning associated with it. IaC requires knowledge of programming languages, configuration management tools, and frameworks for provisioning infrastructure — knowledge an individual or team that’s not familiar will need to learn quickly. Learning will take time while they master not only how to write infrastructure code, but also how to understand the tooling and manage dependencies in unfamiliar technologies.

IaC requires teams to have at least an expert-level knowledge of cloud platform and infrastructure technologies — which in practice means some combination of in-depth knowledge of networking, storage, security, and the other infrastructure components including the networking infrastructure components themselves. This task may become overwhelming quickly for organizations that lack a dedicated infrastructure team or with limited resources, so employees will need the additional upskilling/adoption to fill in the technology gap or hire experts with additional costs and complexity.

Possible Mistakes and Risks

While infrastructure as code (IaC) aims to eliminate human error and streamline provisioning, new risks and mistakes arise. Since everything is now code, mistakes or misconfigurations can be very bad — potentially leading to an infrastructure failure, security vulnerabilities, downtime, or similar events due to a typo, for example. Therefore, using code in production adds significant risk.

There is another risk associated with infrastructure code that is the lack of testing and validation. A development team may best be able to test application code, but, in order to test infrastructure code effectively, one would need to change the way they think and setup their tool chain to conduct the tests. If testing is not completed thoroughly, issues can go unnoticed that manifest while the system is live, and cause serious disruption even if they appear to be minor. Given that infrastructure changes over time and evolves along with changes to applications, it is also crucial to ensure an infrastructure code is up to date. If the infrastructure code does not reflect the true state of the system, it can be risky pursuing its actual vs intended state, which can result in issues that need fixing or further decisions that result in more risks.

IaC tools and frameworks also have bugs and vulnerabilities, now and again causing stability and reliability issues with new releases. It is advisable for organizations to test new releases of tools and frameworks and their own code to mitigate the risks associated with bugs or regressions.

Dependency on tools and frameworks

Infrastructure of Code is heavily dependent on tools and frameworks for provisioning and managing infrastructure resources. While there can be standardization and automation benefits, dependency on the tools and frameworks can become an impediment should the technology become outdated, unsupported, or deprecated altogether, creating challenges for organizations that depend on Infrastructure of Code.

Furthermore, organizations may experience compatibility challenges between their Infrastructure of Code tools and those of the cloud providers. If organizations plan on switching cloud providers or are using several at the same time, they may encounter issues with some tools being very supportive of a particular cloud platform, and limited or no support for another cloud platform altogether. In this instance, certain tools may even lock organizations into certain vendor relationships, thereby jeopardizing the success of the Infrastructure of Code goal altogether.

Benefits of Cloud Platforms

Cloud platforms offer many benefits that appeal to computing environments in enterprises such as ease of use, prebuilt services and features, vendor support and maintenance, availability/reliability, and cost effectiveness.

Ease of Use

The top benefit of cloud platforms is ease of use. Cloud providers provide a user-friendly tiered experience with user interfaces and tools that make deploying and managing applications and services easy for enterprises. Cloud platforms use graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and have simplified management consoles that allow even technical users to navigate and use efficiently to take advantage of cloud platforms – ultimately allowing businesses to manage cloud platforms effectively without needing to be “technical” while helping to lower the learning curves associated with adopting cloud technologies.

Cloud platforms also utilize self-service, enabling end users to provision resources quickly and scale as needed, which allows businesses the ability to respond swiftly to changing requirements without worrying about difficult infrastructure set up and configuration. It also reduces the time to order, set up, and brings systems online, allowing users to create virtual machines, create a storage bucket, or establish a database with only a few clicks – minimizing wasted time and resources.

Pre-Built Services and Features

Cloud platforms provide and offer thousands of pre-built services and pre-built features that help streamline the application development and deployment process in an efficient and cost-effective manner. These Platforms as a Service (PaaS) solutions allow developers to inherit the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components they need to develop scalable, resilient applications.

Cloud platforms often provide managed database services, such as Amazon RDS or Azure SQL Database, that take care of both the aspects of infrastructure and administrative workloads of the database offering, allowing developers to focus on application logic and reducing their workload since they don’t have to administrate infrastructure. Cloud platforms also offer other services that allow businesses to build applications with advanced capabilities, such as message queues or content delivery networks (CDNs), machine learning frameworks, etc., without having to build everything from scratch.

Vendor Support and Maintenance

Cloud platforms offer complete vendor support and maintenance services that take infrastructure management off businesses’ hands! Cloud providers are responsible for server maintenance, security and bug patching, and upgrading hardware – allowing businesses to focus their energy on what they should be focusing on-their core competencies and not spending money managing a back-end service.

Also, cloud vendors have service-level agreements (SLAs) that allow their customers to rely on uptime and availability. Whenever problems arise, cloud providers have dedicated support teams for escalation and reduce the pain for customers. These support teams are staffed 24/7 and can resolve customer inquiries or fix issues as soon as they occur – allowing business to keep their operations running without the infrastructure issue causing too many issues!

High Availability and Reliability

Cloud platforms utilize a distributed infrastructure consisting of several data centers and regions, which is in itself very resilient and reliable. By deploying workloads in the cloud, businesses will see continuing availability in case of hardware failure (failure in one location) or the availability of decision making while affected by a disaster (e.g., hurricane, flood, etc.) in one area.

Cloud platforms also provide replication and back-up services that protect data by automatically storing multiple copies of information at multiple locations and rolling it back in case of an error, as well as providing disaster recovery capabilities as needed. Cloud providers put mitigating controls in place on security concerns, which will prevent unauthorized access to customer data and preserve confidentiality and integrity requirements (business-related critical data).

Disadvantages of Cloud Platforms

Cloud platforms offer challenges that should be accounted for, such as vendor lock-in, a limited ability to customize the service, and vendor pricing structures that do not match the realities of a company’s work and expected activity, and the overall lack of control and visibility.

Vendor Lock-In

A common con associated with cloud platforms is vendor lock-in. Once companies onboard with one platform, they typically become heavily dependent on that vendor’s services and the vendor’s Infrastructure, dramatically reducing their ability to migrate to another vendor. Companies may become truly reliant on particular services that a platform offers, and often platforms use proprietary formats for tenants; if companies or institutions select the wrong proprietary solution it may be impossible to migrate away from, as it could entail enormous costs to migrate data without a proprietary API available from the vendor; in addition many processes for associated data-hosting platforms are database driven, complicating the risk of vendor lock-in. This means the company is likely locked-into a vendor for that piece of actual infrastructure, and need to adopt a level of falsified or at least reduced operational costs, should they decide an alternate route in future. Essentially, low cost, once you consider operational risk, is not really low cost. Limited Customization – Cloud platforms are like a lot of tools – built to be reusable, leading to customization challenges. They provide organizations with a set of features and services to cover a wider range of user – businesses that have unique needs may not get the ability or flexibility to specify customizations to meet requirements, which can lead to performance not reviewing at the level of efficiency required or acceptable processes that organizations subsequently create. Companies and organizations that have special workflow requirements that clarify unique requirements with no exceptions that limits customization will render Cloud Platforms incapable of meeting them, resulting in poor performance or inefficient workflows.

Cost and Pricing Models

While cloud platforms may look inexpensive, organizations can get hit with unexpected costs that were not considered. By having a plan where you pay as needed, flexibility can lead to limitations across cloud resources and eventually more spending. Organizations can get wrapped into contracts that have complex pricing formats, involving costs incurred when your organization exceeds certain limits of resource usage or service access. In addition to all of this, budgetary forecasting seems impossible resulting in budgetary nightmares for organizations who experience unplanned costs.

There are additional, sometimes significant, costs related to providing training and expertise in order to maximize the value of cloud. Organizations are usually required to train and or hire personnel responsible for knowing exactly the cloud company’s way of doing things, thus raising on-boarding and existing costs associated with their deployment and upkeep.

Loss of Control and Visibility

Cloud platforms can cause organizations to lose control and visibility of their Infrastructure and data. With IT vendors running both the physical Infrastructure and systems used by organizations, visibility for the organization’s Ownership of their network configurations, security protocols, and choice of hardware is limited – a significant concern for organizations operating in conjunction with heavily-regulated industries that have strict compliance expectations.

Additionally, cloud platforms can be opaque and hard to see deeply into, without organizations knowing where the data is located, the security protocols, or even how the underlying Infrastructure is performing. This lack of insight can lead to businesses that make business decisions based on a significant amount of confidential or sensitive information to lose trust in using the cloud platform.

Factors to Consider When Deciding Between IaC and Cloud Platforms

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and cloud platforms are both powerful approaches to managing and deploying resources in the cloud, but you need to assess each carefully when deciding about which to use. There are four factors to consider when evaluating whether to use IaC versus cloud platforms: skills/experience/requirements/complexity, budget/costs, and strategy/future scalability.

Skills and Experience

One of the most important factors in selecting an IaC solution is the skill level of your team. IaC processes rely on tools like Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation, that your team might already use – or your team might need training or hiring skilled resources, stopping your ability to move quickly through the process. Cloud platforms generally have user-friendly interfaces and options for management consoles which can make them more accessible with team members who do not have as much technical experience.

Project Complexity and Requirements

The mix of requirements and complexity in your project will matter in your consideration of IaC solutions; IaC is adaptive and customizable to better meet your needs for complex projects with specific configurations or dependencies, while cloud architectures provide pre-configured services and managed solutions for less complex projects that need to be deployed fast with minimal configuration.

Budget and Cost Considerations

Budgetary constraints are an important aspect of organizations. It is important to consider costs when deciding to use IaC versus cloud platforms. There is an upfront cost associated with adopting IaC in terms of investment in infrastructure automation tools and achieving adequate training, but in the long run you may see cost savings due to the amount of control you have over your resource assignments – IaC allows you to move up or down your project resources as you need within a scope to help reduce your total costs. On the other hand, cloud platforms generally use a pay-as-you-go pricing mechanism and may be maximized for your project if you have variable resources.

Long-Term Strategy & Scalability

You should also take care with your long-term strategy, and scalability needs. IaC is a flexible framework for consistent infrastructure deployment, and managing version control is easy when replicating code across environments – perfect for organizations requiring dynamic workloads and have aggressive growth targets. Cloud platforms also provide elastic and scalable Infrastructure out of the box, so checking for any limitations is also critical to ensure it meets long-term growth plans.

Conclusion

Comparing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in cloud platforms has advantages and disadvantages when managing cloud infrastructure. IaC provides an efficient, flexible, method of managing infrastructure. Through automated provisioning, configuring, and deploying of resources using IaC’s strong and flexible methods of provisioning, configuring, and deployment is made simpler. Some of the added advantages of IaC are reproducibility, scalability, and version control which all contribute towards an efficient management of infrastructure in different environments, also, IaC can help teams collaborate better by utilizing DevOps teams’ methods enabling teams to deploy faster, and higher reliability.

Whilst IaC offers more flexibility, it comes with raising significant investment in training, and implementing. Organizations have to train their teams, have to develop standard templates, and flows, and it can also be complex which allows for errors, and there is a lot of testing to do prior to any new changes being made.

Cloud platform providing more simplified options, could lack the same level of flexibility and customization. Organizations could find themselves with some limitations around configuration as code, or integrating existing tools.

When deciding to choose between, Infrastructure as Service (IaC) or cloud platforms will depend on the organizations needs, and resources available. Although IaC could provide more customize control, organizations wanting ease of use, speed, and simplicity could discover cloud platforms more appropriate.