The typical Forbes Global 2000 enterprise has more than 5,000 applications. Amazon EC2 has more than 54,800 possible instance configurations for a simple three-tiered application. Managing the application lifecycle is challenging due to three interrelated degrees of freedom in the cloud: application proliferation, execution venue diversification, and the increase in the rate of change to one or both of the latter.

Creating rigid, hard-wired relationships between applications and infrastructure simply wont scale. Whats needed is the ability to abstract up to the application level, define each applications topology and dependencies, and use this metadata to allow the infrastructure environment to dynamically provision resources based on application criteria. This focus on the application and not just infrastructure is whats behind application-defined cloud management. Session sponsored by cliQr.