In composable infrastructure, compute, storage, and network resources are decorrelated from their physical locations. These resources can be administered via a dedicated program via an online interface. Composable infrastructure therefore transforms data center resources into cloud services. It forms the basis of hybrid and private cloud solutions.
The software developer defines the application’s physical infrastructure needs using rules and service profiles. The software then uses API calls to create (or compose) the infrastructure necessary to run it as a virtual machine or container on bare hardware.
In a composable infrastructure, IT administrators no longer have to worry about the physical location of architectural components. Indeed, a framework defines which are the independent objects “to compose” and each object exposes the information which concerns it via a management API.
When an application requests the infrastructure to run, an Autodiscover process finds available services and resources are allocated on demand. When a resource is no longer needed, the infrastructure reclaims it and makes it available to another application that requests it.
The goal of a composable infrastructure is for an enterprise data center to use its own physical infrastructure at a lower cost, reducing waste and reducing time to deploy a new application.
Several vendors, including HP Enterprise and Cisco, are promoting this concept as a way for internal IT departments to provision workloads as quickly and efficiently as public cloud service providers, while maintaining control over infrastructure. which supports mission-critical applications in a private cloud context.
The idea of consolidating physical infrastructure resources and building a logical infrastructure is justified by the growing popularity of programmable networks (SDNs), object storage, converged infrastructure and DevOps.
Source: Le Mag IT