As VM automation becomes more and more predominant in cloud environments, the issue of abstraction becomes more important. Consider if you will, an infrastructure in which the creation and management of VMs is fully automated.  Now put all those applications and information and VMs in one big cloud that is all self-sufficient and constantly moving around due to load balancing and other automated processes. Then, add in cloud applications, plugins, security and anything else that could possibly run in that environment.  Then, connect it all up so that every part of the infrastructure is inter-dependent and connects through a broker.  And for fun’s sake, let’s assume there is a memory leak on one of the servers and your start losing VMs.  Continue reading →