The cloud has enabled organizations to focus on managing workloads, enabling new capabilities to elastically scale workloads on demand. Public cloud providers offer IT resources as a service, to be scaled up (and down) as demand requires.

With composable infrastructure, the benefits of converged and hyperconverged infrastructures are extended to physical assets, managed as resource pools. Workloads with pre-defined resourcing requirements allow automated, API-driven deployment of resources matching those requirements. Any application or platform can be composed of these resources, creating a common set of infrastructure components across all workload types – physical, virtual and container – for legacy and modern applications.

With this shift in modern infrastructure, defining underlying infrastructure using software defined, API-driven architecture is imperative. Applications will come with pre-defined resource requirements that composable infrastructure needs to fulfill in an automated, orchestrated way. The deployment of an application may require physical resources for the workload to run on (bare metal) or be deployed onto virtualization hypervisors or containers for more granular resource sharing, with these assets scaled at the physical layer based on the demands of the application.

Connectivity will be defined by policy, inclusive of security, to ensure that every application and workload deployment adheres to a common management and security policy framework.

Organizations grow their IT requirements both organically and through mergers and acquisitions, creating isolated IT silos of disparate technologies and multiple public clouds. With the shift towards composability for on premises infrastructure providing flexible deployment and scale like the public cloud, it’s important to orchestrate the deployment of applications and workloads into each platform using common automation and orchestration tools and methodologies. 

By utilizing fewer tools against multiple environments, templating the deployment for an application against each environment can be standardized, allowing for the flexible deployment of any application or workload anywhere via configuration flags without any new infrastructure as code.

For modern applications, infrastructure needs to be deployed on demand in a predictable, reliable way, using automation and orchestration across the software deployment lifecycle. Today’s modern applications utilize a CI/CD methodology that includes continuous testing and validation. Resources using infrastructure as code to support this process, and retired when no longer needed, maximizes asset utilization.

The ability to scale resources to meet peak demands, and release those resources when peak activity concludes, further improves utilization while reducing costs. With a common tool set for orchestration and automation IT can achieve this using common methodologies while enforcing common management and security policy controls.