Hi Paul,

Thanks for your question. When you ask how composable infrastructure compares to cloud, I am assuming you mean Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS). Gartner defines IaaS as: “...a standardized, highly automated offering, where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities are owned and hosted by a service provider and offered to customers on-demand. Customers are able to self-provision this infrastructure, using a Web-based graphical user interface that serves as an IT operations management console for the overall environment.” (Gartner’s IT Glossary)

Using this definition, a fundamental difference between composable infrastructure and IaaS is the ability for the customer/end user to provision the infrastructure, typically through a self-service portal. As the Forbes article explains, composable infrastructure is application-centric. The application composes the infrastructure it requires on demand without the need for an administrator or end-user to allocate and provision the resources. This is done through the API and UCS management software in Cisco Composable Infrastructure.