## Looking at the Principles of Workload Management 

Management  in this context refers to how resources are assigned in order to process workloads. Assignments may be based on resource availability, business priorities, or event scheduling. 

The idea of managing workloads has been around for decades. In the unified mainframe-computing era, workload management was pretty straightforward. When a task had to be executed, a job was scheduled to run on that system. The instructions for running that task or job were typically written in a complex job-control instruction language. This set of commands helped the IT organization carefully plan the execution of workloads. If a mission-critical workload required a huge amount of time to run, a set of instructions could be established to stop that workload and allow another workload to run. When the second workload finished executing its task, the long-running workload could resume. 

The challenge in managing any workload is making sure that it can be executed and delivered at the right performance level. It involves understanding processing requirements, modeling resources, and determining capacity. The principle is not that difficult if you’re dealing with applications running on one server or even in a homogeneous cloud environment. And, if you’re using just a public cloud provider then that provider manages your workloads. However, as IT infrastruc- tures become more complex and heterogeneous, such as in a hybrid environment, this becomes harder to do. 

## Seeing Workload Management in a Hybrid Cloud 

Things get a lot more complicated in a hybrid cloud environment. With the advent of a hybrid cloud, many more applications and services exist across different countries that have to run. Some workloads may be permanent and need to 

