First, we must take a step back and have a look at the landscape. We can either use a cloud provider, such as AWS or Azure, or we can use our own internal cloud solution, such as VMware or OpenStack. There are valid arguments for both external and internal cloud providers or even both, depending on your organization.

Some types of organizations, such as government agencies, must store all data regarding citizens within their own walls. Such organizations can't use external cloud providers and services and must instead build their own internal cloud equivalents.

Smaller private organizations might benefit from using an external cloud provider but can't perhaps afford having all their resources with such a provider. They might opt to have in-house servers for normal loads and scale out to an external cloud provider during peak loads.

Many of the configuration systems we have described here support the management of cloud nodes as well as local nodes. PalletOps supports AWS and...