Cloud Computing is commonly defined as a model for enabling the rapid provisioning of on demand computing resources from a shared pool with minimal management and interactions from the service provider. The cloud model enables key features, such as self-service resource provisioning and rapid elasticity, which can be leveraged to quickly augment compute-intensive tasks or rapidly prototype new applications.

In this talk, we will take a Python-centric look at automating resource provisioning and management. Among others, we will address questions such as: - Can a consumer really provision computing capabilities unilaterally? - What are current and emerging Python tools that help facilitate the various provisioning tasks? - How easily can a provisioned solution adapt to changes in workload? - What, if any, are the key challenges associated with local, regional and global application deployment?

Examples and use cases will largely be based on open source tools (eg, Salt, Ansible, Apache libcloud) that are ready to support multiple infrastructure platform providers.