The Evolution of Cloud Infrastructure Automation: A Deep Dive into Its Impacts on the Retail Industry

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Chandrashekar Pandugula, Shakir Syed

Abstract

Cloud infrastructure has seen explosive growth in the last two decades. Initially limited to providing compute resources, cloud infrastructure now offers an ecosystem of products that can be customized to user requirements. Retail has been quick to adopt these cloud technologies to leverage on-demand resource allocation to cater for daily, monthly, and annual spikes in user traffic.


Due to rapidly increasing complexity and scale of cloud deployments, intelligent automation approaches have now emerged as a requirement rather than an option. This work looks into the evolution of cloud infrastructure; delving deeper into the ongoing shift from cloud management to cloud automation; analyzing the current landscape; and understanding the impacts it has on various sectors by focusing on the retail use-case.


An inference of the future trends and research directions for researchers, practitioners, and businesses aiming to maximize supreme intelligent automation in cloud deployments is also provided.


The cloud computing infrastructure has seen unparalleled growth over the past two decades. With the advent of cloud technologies, applications have aimed to leverage cloud infrastructure, making use of heterogeneous resources (compute, storage, network) from multiple cloud providers. Cloud computing was once thought of as a service solely for hosting VMs. However, the cloud resources, instead of offering monolithic VMs, now offer a wide range of infrastructure requirements (disks, memory, vCPUs, GPUs, TPUs, and whatnot). Since their inception, cloud providers have been expanding and fine-tuning their resource offerings to cater for as many custom requirements as possible; high memory instances, maximum bandwidth, relocatable disks, and whatnot.

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