Cloudify 3.4 Has Dropped – Orchestrate All Clouds!
Team Cloudify is very excited to announce the Cloudify 3.4 GA release! This was definitely the most packed release of Cloudify ever and brings with it some major improvements, all of which culminates in support for hybrid environments, with any stack, and on any workload, and covering more than 90% of infrastructures and workloads used by major enterprises.
Orchestrate your hybrid cloud application on all of the major clouds. Get Cloudify. Go
We are proud to introduce our latest Cloudify plugins for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). These join our now fully open source VMware plugins for vSphere and vCloud, as well as AWS and OpenStack plugins. We also have more robust support for Windows on all supported clouds.
In the realm of hybrid workloads, our enhanced Kubernetes support now gives users the ability to deploy Kubernetes on any cloud, manage microservices on top of Kubernetes along with stateful services, and trigger auto-scaling and auto-healing of microservices and Kubernetes minions.
Let’s get into some of the major improvements under the hood.
Orchestration Enhancements
Users can now make live topology changes to running deployments and include new resources. Also, our blueprint composition feature allows users to decompose large blueprints into importable parts so that they’re more easily manageable and organized. In 3.5, we plan to provide the ability to compose applications from multiple services (blueprints).
On top of that, the resource grouping feature allows one-to-one scaling of relationships and groups of resources. Another scalability improvement was the overhaul of the Management Worker architecture, which removes the dedicated deployment workers and consolidates all task executions to be handled by the Management Worker.
Cloudify Manager Upgrades and Bootstrap Quick Install
Cloudify Manager in-place upgrades are now available from 3.4.x! Users will be able to upgrade all manager components making the upgrade process smoother and simpler. In order to do this, we introduced another feature called Maintenance Mode which safely stops any running service and prevents the user from triggering any new executions during the update process.
The team also worked hard to make bootstrap significantly faster and easier. Bootstrapping a manager is as simple as installing a tar file or using our AMI or QCOW (OpenStack) images for quick installation on those clouds.
Web UI Improvements
Our UI team has added many great new features to make Cloudify Manager management easier. The new and improved UI layout takes advantage of screen real estate and new Snapshots and Plugins management views were added as well for ease of use. Manager Maintenance mode is also available from the UI directly.
Cloudify CLI
After giving a lot of thought to the process of installing applications using Cloudify Manager, we significantly shortened the process of deploying the application using the CLI. To do this, the ‘install’ command now runs the ‘upload’, ‘create’, and ‘execute’ commands all in one, saving the user time and effort.
Cloudify Composer
Our Composer, the graphical editor for creating YAML blueprints in a drag and drop environment, has been updated with some new features, including Linux and Mac script-based installation, the ability to load and manage additional node types, and the ability upload blueprints directly into Cloudify Composer.
For more details on Cloudify 3.4, see our Product Page and read the release notes. Stay tuned for some more detailed posts on how to deploy a Kubernetes cluster, how manager updates work, and details on our Windows support.
Also, if you are interested, we recently launched a Kubernetes Lab for users to get their own lab environment for testing Kubernetes deployments with Cloudify and a hybrid cloud online course is coming soon.