2 Description
This section provides context for this Building Block.
Last updated
This section provides context for this Building Block.
Last updated
Use-Case for Cloud Infrastructure: Digital services require software to be deployed on hardware. Modern practices allow for fully automated, software-defined deployments across development, testing, and production environments. The infrastructure building block specification supports this by enabling software specification that allows to connect virtual resources as needed. Solutions which adhere to this building block should achieve these goals.
Mature open-source tools are available to build and manage flexible cloud and container infrastructures. With the right guidelines, standardization, hardware, and an operations team, this setup can run in any data center using common server stack. It can also be offered by providers as a public cloud service. This approach ensures control, transparency, and strong digital sovereignty.
States, societies, companies, and individuals have much to gain by leveraging modern digital cloud-based technology. Yet embracing technology without oversight over dependencies can easily result in situations where digital infrastructure is at the mercy of large foreign entities without any substantial possibility to exercise your own control over it, without any possibility to reflect your own values or to assert your own regulation over it. Vendor lock-in is the opposite of digital sovereignty. Governments need to have the choice and ability to design and control their IT environments and cloud technology to ensure security, independence, and data sovereignty for their citizens. See chapter 5 for considerations on digital sovereignty.
Software development and operations has advanced significantly over the last two decades; the creation of customer-focused cross-functional fast-moving agile teams has significantly enhanced the speed of innovation and – if implemented right – also the quality of the delivered service. To leverage their full potential, such teams need access to pooled infrastructure that can be consumed on-demand via the network with self-service APIs that allow full automation and rapid elasticity in a pay-per-use model. The 2011 NIST definition of cloud-computing reflects this. The empowering effect and the process speed up by allowing developers, testers and operators to create and connect the needed infrastructure via self-service in a fully automated way controlled by software can not be overestimated.
While many organizations have benefitted from gradually adapting their workloads to take advantage of the automation possibilities of cloud computing, the IT industry witnesses a new generation of workloads that has been designed from the ground up to take full advantage of the possibilities of cloud infrastructure; auto-scaling stateless services on-demand to the current level of load and automating a lot of the operational tasks that would otherwise be done manually by operations teams. These workloads are called cloud-native. While the first wave of these were based on virtual machines (VMs), we see a second, larger wave of these that leverage container technologies. In many cases, these containers run on top of virtual machines, thus allowing to balance good developer abstractions and fast scalability (where container technologies excel) with flexibility and isolation requirements (the strength of virtualization technology). In dedicated environments however, it can be beneficial to cut out the complexity of a virtualization layer and to run containers on bare-metal.
In all cases, users of the technology should consider the dependencies on providers of technology and infrastructure and take deliberate decisions on all components of the technology stack required to develop and run their workloads.
