2. Demystifying Software-Defined Cloud Environments

There is an executive’s guide to the software-defined data center (SDDC) published by TechRepublic, USA. This document details and describes the nitty-gritty of next-generation Cloud centers. The motivations, the key advantages, and the enabling tools and engines along with other relevant details are being neatly illustrated there. An SDDC is an integrated abstraction layer that defines a complete data center by means of a layer of software that presents the resources of the data center as pools of virtual and physical resources and allows their composition into arbitrary user-defined services. A modern SDDC deployment is defined by virtualized, software-defined resources that can be scaled up or down as required and can be deployed as needed in a number of distinct ways. There are three key components to the SDDC: (1) software-defined computing, (2) Software-Defined Network, and (3) software-defined storage. This chapter is to describe how the tools-assisted and automated software-defined environments are going to be the game-changer for businesses and governments.