The current trend towards the digitization of many areas of work in our daily lives will bring fundamental changes in almost all professions. These changes, which will have similar effects as the industrial revolution, also affect the job of the system administrator and the nature of the provisioning and management of server systems and IT services.

Successful digitization requires a holistic view of IT administration and can only be achieved by automating all individual steps. Open source technologies such as KVM, Ceph and OpenVswitch are professional tools for building and operating modern IT infrastructures.

The openQRM Community Edition provides API interfaces to all popular open source components, such as bare metal and VM provisioning, configuration management, network and storage administration, as well as system and service monitoring and IT documentation and combines them into a fully automated cloud workflow. The resulting IaaS self-service service provides the individual components as a cloud product for independent ordering via the openQRM Cloud Portal. Coupled with an integrated e-commerce front-end and bugtracker, the openQRM Cloud also includes its own billing system as well as an application marketplace for the automation of software provision.

The openQRM automation layer controls and automates the underlying tools. Our case studies include KVM hosts and VMs for virtualization, a Ceph cluster as a storage backend, OpenVswitch for network virtualization, and Puppet for the provisioning of applications and configuration management.

Over 50 different technologies are available as plug-ins in openQRM so that any combination of different tools is possible and can be automated.

This presentation presents the technical and social challenges for the upcoming digitization and shows possible solution scenarios using the case study: KVM / Ceph / OpenVswitch / Puppet / openQRM.