The Cloud Service Provider (CSP) operational process responsible for receiving, fulfilling, managing, monitoring, and metering customer services across all data centers, availability zones, and regions is referred to as cloud orchestration.
The CSP software component responsible for orchestration is called the cloud operating system. Orchestration is accomplished using hardware, software, and service application programming interfaces (APIs). Most cloud computing APIs use the Representational State Transfer (REST) communications protocol.
Cloud data centers typically have 10,000 or more servers on site, all devoted to running relatively few applications that are built with consistent infrastructure components (such as racks, hardware, OS, and networking). Cloud data centers are:
- Constructed for a different purpose
- Created at a different time than the traditional data center
- Built to a different scale
- Not constrained by the same limitations
- Performing different workloads than traditional data centers
Because of this design approach, the economics of a cloud data center are significantly different.