Come Get Some Cloudify 3.3

Cloudify 3.3 has landed! We’re really excited about this new release because we have reached down deep to make Cloudify more ready than ever before for production. We are also seeing Cloudify’s usage taking off in use cases related to NFV, hybrid workloads, and containers and we wanted to fill you in on what we have been up to.
So, keeping in line with our mission of being the best pure-play cloud application orchestration platform, we really paid attention to the details in this important release, which brings many new features and integrations in each of these arenas.

Cloudify 3.3 has landed – and it’s awesome.  Get it!

Containers, NFV and Other Goodies

Containers are definitely here to stay and while there are many good orchestration solutions for purely containerized workloads, we are seeing hybrid deployments becoming a larger part of the landscape, especially in large enterprises and telecoms where containers cannot provide all of the requirements. Kubernetes has been the go-to container management tool as of late, given its strong industry support and orchestration features. So we created a plugin that allows users to orchestrate a Kubernetes cluster on any infrastructure, and then use TOSCA to model hybrid workloads that mix and match between containers and non-containerized deployments . In the same vein, we are also tightly integrated with Docker itself making it easy to model Docker-based workloads and deploy Docker containers on any cloud.

We’ve also recently integrated Cloudify with OpenStack Murano, which enables OpenStack users to extend the Murano catalog deployment capabilities and support the deployment of Murano applications to all major cloud providers.

NFV has also been a very hot topic lately, and Cloudify is the only open source solution that can meet the demanding requirements of NFV and fulfills the NFV MANO vision of ETSI. Among others, we have been working intensively with Deutsche Telekom and other tier-1 operators, as well being integrated into OPNFV. The OPNFV Functest team, led by the great folks at Orange Labs, have already selected Cloudify as its orchestrator of choice in the OPNFV vIMS POC. In fact, at the OPNFV Summit this year, their team described Cloudify as the only tool that was able to orchestrate an entire automated lifecycle management cycle for their IMS application.
To demonstrate Cloudify’s NFV orchestration capabilities, we have recently updated and published our integration with MetaSwitch’s Clearwater project, in which we demo a vIMS with Clearwater to create and run a scalable audio and video call application.

Finally, one of the main focus areas for Cloudify has been cloud portability and the ability to spread deployments over multiple clouds. To that effect, we have some really great plugins available, and upcoming, that will bring Cloudify to even more clouds. Among others, we have significantly enhanced the AWS plugin to fully support VPC. We have also implemented all new plugins for Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Platform.

Ready, Set, Production

In its current state, cloud orchestration is still a mix of heterogeneous architecture and fractured tooling sets. For these reasons, it’s been difficult for organizations to go to production with mission critical applications. To that end, here are the features and functionalities in Cloudify 3.3 to make your project production ready:

• High Scalability – Thousands of deployments on a single Cloudify manager
• Offline Installation – The Cloudify manager, agents and plugins can all be installed in a completely offline environment, which is the case in many enterprises and carriers
• Manager Snapshots – Full backup and restore functionality which allows users to recover from failures or planned down time
• Role-Based Access Control – Allows admins to configure which API resources  a certain user can access using a pluggable system of roles and permissions
• RHEL/CentOS 7+ Support – Cloudify manager now runs natively on CentOS and RHEL and is fully integrated with the native RPM based package management and system.

That’s Not All

We also have loads of improvements that will make your Cloudify experience that much better:

• Componentized manager – tweak any piece of the Cloudify manager stack or bring your own
• All new Cloudify manager AMI for easier setup on AWS
• Cloud-Init integration – Allows users to install agents and other components without the need for SSHing into the machine
• Security – Added transport security with RabbitMQ SSL and custom user/pass
• UI Improvements – Pagination, Filtering, and Scalability
• Plugin Packaging – Build your own offline Cloudify custom plugin packages
• REST API Versioning
• New Application Topology View

Cloudify Composer – Official Release

We are also happy to announce that the Cloudify Composer (previously Blueprint Composer) is now available as a premium feature with Cloudify 3.3!
For the uninitiated, the Cloudify Composer is a GUI built to assist users in designing blueprints with a simple drag and drop interface. And now, it’s ready for general consumption, so if you are looking to try out the Composer, you can request the evaluation version here.
Get your Cloudify on with 3.3 from our new and improved download page!