Evolution of the IBM Cloud: Enabling an enterprise cloud services ecosystem

Cloud computing is a new paradigm that is transforming the information technology (IT) industry and reshaping the way enterprise services are developed, deployed, sold, delivered, and consumed. Instead of managing complex IT systems, customers can focus on the core competence of their enterprise while obtaining all required IT functions as a service. From the perspective of a cloud provider, remaining competitive and realizing full potential of economies of scale that the cloud paradigm promises require extreme levels of standardization, automation, and optimization. This paper describes the evolution of the Common Cloud Management Platform (CCMP), a management system providing business and operations support for cloud services. We cover its initial implementation and applications, discuss the latest challenges faced when adapting enterprise solutions to the cloud, and introduce the exploratory research topics to which this work led. We address the business services aspects, including framework-based integration of the catalog, and customer and revenue management, as well as the operational aspects, including novel approaches for scalable virtual machine provisioning and adaptive workload placement optimization. We discuss architecture, design, and implementation details of key CCMP components and highlight the challenging aspects of providing such architecture while promoting scalability, modularity, and reuse.