Maureen O'Gara

Skytap, the test and dev cloud automation house, has added self-service cloud orchestration and network routing features to its bag of tricks to reduce the time it takes to move complicated virtualized workloads to the cloud.

It's automated the order in which users want multi-machine virtual data centers deployed or shut down and engraves those rules - including time delays - in stone so the sequence repeats itself. Like, say, Active Directory server first, followed by the Team Foundation server, the database server, the load balancer and the web servers.

Users can also connect different virtual networks together on-the-fly and have VMs on the connected networks talk to each other complements of a few keystrokes, no scripts.

Users can re-create a traditional "server hub and spoke" model in the cloud by connecting any number of configurations to one server and setting up custom DNS services. Redundant servers can then be eliminated, server set-up errors avoided and cloud usage costs reduced.

Skytap has the 451 Group remark that "As cloud services mature, enterprises will expect the providers to more closely mirror traditional data center processes....End users will benefit more from cloud services that automate the networking and workflow processes already used in their data center environments."