Key to this agile provisioning is the concept of orchestration, where a single request can coordinate a number of different actions, all coordinated to create the desired outcome. One can think of this as a coordinated business process; this orchestration reaches out to the virtual storage, network, and machines inventoried by IT infrastructure operations to create a complete compute instance for the requester. It can't be emphasized enough how critical this is to the concept of a private cloud; without agile provisioning private clouds devolve down to nothing more than more efficient IT operations, rather than making IT more responsive to business initiatives. Expect much more emphasis on this subject as the concept of private clouds gets further awareness.
Application Management: Since much of the impetus for private clouds (and public clouds, for that matter) is to move control of computing closer to the users, a key function that must be available to business application groups is to be able to monitor and manage their applications. In some sense, the role of operations is bifurcating, with infrastructure operations remaining with the data center operations group, and management of the software components that comprise an application residing with application groups.
One can expect this to be a messy transition, as operations today spans applications, core frameworks and components (e.g., databases), and hardware. Echoing Amazon, where Amazon maintains responsibility for the compute infrastructure, while application developers are responsible for the application components, look for application management to transition above the line. Again, this is a service available to the application group, which will be able to more directly control the software components it has deployed to meet business goals.
Scalability: Cloud users expect application topologies to expand or contract as needed to match application needs to resource availability. Put another way, it must be easy to make the amount of compute resources devoted to an application to be congruent with compute load. As traditionally practiced, this is one of the least flexible aspects of data center operations. Because compute resources tend to be sticky, applications often have insufficient resources available as needed, with little ability to modify resource availability in an acceptable timeframe.
In the world of private clouds, application groups expect that it will be easy to add or subtract resources as appropriate; in fact, application groups expect that the application management system will monitor system performance and resource use and automatically adjust the resources available to an appropriate level.
Chargeback: The ability to charge according to resources consumed rather than a fixed amount of assigned capacity. The concept of chargeback being an integral part of private clouds is controversial. Some maintain that very granular pricing must be in place for cloud computing to operate effectively; others maintain that the mode of payment is incidental to the scalability and flexibility of commitment that are the true hallmarks of cloud computing. The typical practice in place for internal IT today is that, upon request for compute resource (e.g., a four-processor machine with 16 GB of memory, 50GB of storage, and 8 NICs) a capital charge is applied, meaning that an overall cost for the acquisition of the system (perhaps $8,000 in this case) is transferred from the requesting group to the IT organization; in addition, the overhead costs for the IT group (headcount, facilities, etc., etc., down to the donuts put out every Friday) are applied, pro rata, to IT-consuming organizations.
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