Characterizing the next-generation hardware systems 

Similar to the quickly growing software engineering field, hardware engineering is also on the fast track. These days, there are clusters, grids, and clouds of IT infrastructures. There are powerful appliances, cloud-in-a-box options, hyper-converged infrastructures, and commodity servers for hosting IT platforms and business applications. The physical machines are touted as bare metal servers. The virtual versions of the physical machines are the virtual machines and containers. We are heading toward the era of hardware infrastructure programming. That is, closed, inflexible, and difficult to manage and maintain bare-metal servers are being partitioned into a number of virtual machines and containers that are highly flexible, open, easily manageable, and replaceable, not to mention quickly provisionable, independently deployable, and horizontally scalable. The infrastructure partitioning and provisioning gets sped up with scores of automated tools to enable the rapid delivery of software applications. The rewarding aspects of continuous integration, deployment, and delivery are being facilitated through a combination of containers, microservices, configuration management solutions, DevOps tools, and Continuous Integration (CI) platforms.