Cloudify 4.3 Has Shipped! Improving Ease of Use, Resource Governance, and Containerization

We’re delighted to announce that we have shipped Cloudify 4.3! This iteration of Cloudify brings users two new offline install methods that will greatly simplify your Cloudify installation experience. We now have a single RPM archive for RHEL/CentOS 7.4 and a new Docker image both with Cloudify Manager and all dependencies, as well as plugin updates – all to get you up and running with Cloudify in no time.
Another crucial upgrade we made in this release is resource visibility. This allows even more fine-grained control for users creating or uploading new resources to Cloudify. We’ve also added some new functionality for blueprint composer users utilizing Cloudify Composer.

Read the Application Defined Governance Whitepaper Today!

So, let’s get to the nitty gritty. Here are some of the features and upgrades for Cloudify 4.3:

New offline Cloudify Manager installation

Cloudify is a complex application consisting of over a dozen other open source services. In order to deal with this complexity, our previous bootstrap would consist of a blueprint that Cloudify used to provision all of these resources in order to bring up a manager. As Cloudify has matured, so have our installation methods.
We are excited to announce that Cloudify 4.3 brings users the all-new Cloudify Manager single RPM file with all dependencies pre-packaged. This means users can now download it once, run a single install command, and have a Cloudify Manager available in only a few minutes!
We will be detailing this process in a future post by the developer who spearheaded this project, but for now, you can find the RPM on the download page.

Containers and Cloudify

New Docker image distro

Another quick install option, for the Docker fans out there, is our all-new Cloudify Manager Docker Image which you can find on our download page. This image allows you to easily install Cloudify Manager with only two commands. You can read the installation instructions in the docs (but don’t forget to check the prerequisites first).

Kubernetes

In the last year or so, Cloudify has been improving its Kubernetes integration as you may have read about already. We created a Kubernetes Provider that allows Cloudify to be used as Kubernetes’ infrastructure manager and makes it easy to deploy a cluster on multiple clouds and manage them simultaneously. We also wrote about the updated Kubernetes 2.0 Plugin which added a number of important features to enhance the integration. We have continued building upon these two and added more features which you can check out here and here.

Plugin improvements

One of the most instrumental aspects of Cloudify is its ability to talk with other applications and systems, which is done with the use of plugins. We are consistently improving our plugins and updating them to work with the latest versions of various IaaS, container tools such as Kubernetes, and many other applications.
In Cloudify 4.3, we are proud to be offering a new method to easily upload the most common, out-of-the-box plugins that users need. To do this, users simply run cfy plugins bundle-upload (see here) and the OS-specific plugins will be uploaded to the manager. You can find all of our plugins on the plugin page.

Enhanced resource visibility

In Cloudify 4.2, we brought forth the governance concept of Resource Availability where we introduced not only User and Tenant resources, but also Global Resources. In Cloudify 4.3, we upgraded a few key aspects of this feature and gave it a new name – Resource Visibility.
Among the upgrades is the ability to set permissions of resources via Cloudify Console (the web UI) upon upload. We also now enable Users or Sys Admins to set an already uploaded resource from Private (that User only) to Tenant (all Users in tenant) or Global (all Users in all tenants). A resource, such as a secret, that is changed from Private to Tenant cannot be reverted back to Private as a different User on that tenant utilizing that specific secret would run into issues with their deployments in such a case.
A future post will be going out soon detailing our approach to resource governance, including a video on how to optimize your resource handling in Cloudify.

Cloudify Composer improvements

The graphic tool to easily create your own blueprints now supports multiple blueprint operations, includes a catalog presenting the plugins already uploaded to Cloudify Manager, a pre-packaged set of IaaS templates for a quicker start, and many bug fixes. Check it out by running a manager, going to the “Blueprints Catalog” menu, and clicking the “Cloudify Composer” button.
Check out the Release Notes for this latest version to see all the new features, improvements, and updates.