You might find this article helpful. It comes from the InFocus Blog:

Notes From The Field: Inside A Real World Large-Scale Cloud Deployment

I’ve been granted an incredible opportunity. Over the past three and a half months I have gotten to lead a real world large-scale delivery of a cloud solution. The final solution will be delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to the customer via an on-premise managed service. While I have developed SaaS/PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) solutions in the past, I was fortunate enough to have been able to build those on public cloud infrastructures. This has been a rare glimpse into the “making of the sausage” having to orchestrate everything from delivery of the hardware into the data center in four countries to testing and integration with the customer environment.

You can read the whole article here: https://infocus.emc.com/jp_morgenthal/notes-from-the-field-inside-a-real-world-large-scale-cloud-deployment/