Multi-Cloud Doesn’t Have to Mean Multi-Headache with Cloud Management Platforms
One of an elite group of VMware Certified Design Experts in Cloud Management and Automation that includes just 25 architects worldwide, Will Huber demystifies the newest breed of tools that have emerged upon the IT landscape – the Cloud Management Platform (CMP). Learn how CMPs help IT organizations like yours manage heterogeneous cloud environments in a single interface.
As companies today embrace digital transformation and continually look for new ways to remain competitive, address new markets, and innovate, IT is challenged to keep up with the accelerated pace of doing business. IT departments are pressured to deliver services faster and meet or exceed expected service levels like never before. Business users expect access to critical applications, intelligent information retrieval and delivery, rich media content, and an immersive commercial experience that is increasingly more aligned with today’s instant app store reality. Often times, IT is mandated to deliver that experience with flat or shrinking budgets.
To meet the growing IT demands of your customers, a relatively new class of integrated software solution has emerged—the Cloud Management Platform (CMP). Designed for public, private, and hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environments, a CMP provides security, improves quality, and optimizes workload availability. Levels of automation, platform maturity, and complexity separate one CMP solution from another.
Multi-Cloud Strategies
Whether through innovation or necessity, IT departments are adopting multi-cloud strategies that include a mixture of public and private cloud offerings. Multi-cloud strategies give IT shops the added flexibility to pick the right cloud for the right workload. That means you can give your end users what they need when they need it while maintaining compliance with corporate standards and security practices. CMP tools help IT organizations manage heterogeneous cloud environments with a single interface. In today’s multi-cloud landscape, CMP adoption is extremely important because it empowers your IT staff to manage these platforms and streamline operations.
In mixed, multi-cloud environments, you can often benefit from leveraging IT operations management architectures to manage both legacy and cloud environments. However, a relatively new challenge that is introduced by leveraging multiple clouds and services is that every cloud provider uses their own management tools, reports, and processes; and managing all of these puts additional strain on IT management. For data centers with mixed infrastructure, costs can rapidly accelerate.
Required CMP Features
The cloud functionality that your organization requires is as unique as its history, growth plans, complexity, costs, budgets, revenues, and number of employees. Add to this mix the level of variation and diversity in your service offerings and virtualized infrastructure, and you have the minimum requirements for deciding on the right CMP for you.
In general, I believe every CMP should have the following core functionality:
- Self-Service Catalog: An inventory of capabilities packaged separately and often collectively working together as a series. Examples include application performance, monitoring, reliability, scalability, operations, and continuous delivery. Users expect direct access to these self-service capabilities through powerful data-driven dashboards, interfaces, and APIs.
- Governance: A configuration management, workflow, and rules engine with details covering service level agreements, process, accountability, finance, change management, and compliance.
- Billing/Metering: Rather than plan and bill based on monthly or hourly costs against compute resources with predetermined patterns for utilization, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) billing and metering enables you to calculate actual usage. For example, arrive at a cost for each service, application, and transaction in your PaaS catalog based on actual CPU utilization, network bandwidth, and disk consumption. Chargeback functionality is also a popular trend.
- Extensibility: A CMP cannot deliver services in isolation. Integration with the enterprise ecosystem of infrastructures, management tools, orchestration platforms, monitoring and reporting tools, and systems of record is extremely critical.
- In-Life Service Management: The day-to-day IT Service Management processes, procedures, and services that you are required to manage including service level agreements, vendors, ITIL, application life-cycle support, capacity planning, resource management, asset utilization, and monitoring. More advanced features might include performance management, interoperability between public and private infrastructure, patching of infrastructure and applications, enterprise management integration, reliability, and access management.
The CMP Market
There are many different vendors that offer CMP tools in the IT marketplace. CMP has been a highly volatile space in terms of acquisition and will remain so, as larger technology vendors look to capitalize on the market opportunity. We have already seen the following significant acquisitions and startups in this space in the last five years:
- VMware acquired DynamicOps in 2012 and continues to use the technology in their vRealize Automation product.
- RedHat acquired ManageIQ in 2012 (now CloudForms).
- Cisco acquired CliQr in March of 2016 (now Cisco Cloud Center)
- Shortly after CliQr, ServiceNow announced the acquisition of ITApp in April of 2016, which is currently being integrated into their CMP platform offering.
- IBM, HP Enterprise, BMC, and a handful of other startups like RightScale, Scalr, and DivvyCloud have their own CMP offerings.
CDI has experience with many of the leading providers in this space and has deployed the technology across a wide variety of customers in many different industries. Customers today enjoy leveraging our experience in this space. We can provide valuable insights and an objective view of the choices available in the market, and not only help customers pick the right tool for them, but implement it in the best and most efficient way possible, and then optionally manage the platform with our portfolio of Managed Services offerings.