Summary
To create new services, the orchestration and automation systems need to work together to provision and activate the technical building blocks that make up the overall cloud service. There are a number of steps that need to take place in any fulfillment activity:
- An infrastructure model needs to build which represents the physical building blocks, capabilities, and constraints that make up cloud infrastructure deployed by the cloud provider.
- This infrastructure model is typically mastered in the service inventory or CMDB, but in the future, it is likely in the future it will be held in the infrastructure itself.
- After an infrastructure model is in place, tenant services can be overlaid on top, first by reserving a set of resources that support the logical building blocks and then by activating the resources on the various physical building blocks.
- The orchestration and automation tools not only play a part in the provisioning and activation process but also have a significant impact in service life cycle management.