Software-defined infrastructure
Software-defined infrastructure is the definition of technical computing infrastructure entirely under the control of software with no operator or human intervention. It operates independent of any hardware-specific dependencies and is programmatically extensible.
In the SDI approach, an application's infrastructure requirements are defined declaratively such that sufficient and appropriate hardware can be automatically derived and provisioned to deliver those requirements.
Typical deployments require software-defined networking and cloud computing capabilities as a minimal point of entry.
Advanced capabilities enable the transition from one configuration to another without downtime, by automatically calculating the set of state changes between one configuration and another and an automated transition step between each step, thus achieving the complete change via software.
Additional value from SDI approach is to have versioning of your landscape enabling rollback and cloning.
