Building foundations for intelligent cloud infrastructure with a focus on scalability and security

The Internet has become a service platform for almost every organization and an integral part of daily life for most people. Therefore, service users demand more from online service providers today than they did in the past. For example, a bank's online service must be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, perform transactions at lightning speed, and be secure from data leaks and cyberattacks. Banks are not alone in serving demanding customers. People demand a similar experience from hotels, airline systems, and almost any other service that has an online component. Service providers recognize that there is a large market and significant profit to be gained by providing a better online experience than their competitors (Armbrust et al., 2010; Amodei et al., 2016; Banerjee & Nayak, 2022).

Large online service providers themselves demand better infrastructure in order to meet the needs of the users who are placing ever-greater demands on them. They regularly report outages, which undermine consumer confidence in their ability to provide a reliable service. When major cloud services go down for hours or days, virtually every online service is impacted because they rely on one or more of these service providers. Creating an infrastructure that is massively scalable in the face of user demand and massively redundant, both geographically and in terms of mitigat-able failure points, is not easy. Indeed, these issues are compounded by the fact that the infrastructure required to scale reliable service is generally, in the early stages at least, prohibitively expensive. It is not economically feasible for all online service providers to support their own infrastructure, nor is it even likely to be necessary. A result of these competing needs of the user community and the service providers is the emergence of cloud services.