Cloudify: Simplifying complex environments

By introducing ‘Environment as a Service’, the latest Cloudify release has made massive strides to simplify the way organizations automate and manage multi-cloud services and network orchestration.

According to Gartner, DevOps toolchains ‘can include dozens of unintegrated tools, which makes automation a technically complex and arduous task’. Enterprises often need to spend considerable time and effort to achieve consistent delivery and management across CI/CD pipelines, multi-cloud services and network infrastructures.

Cloudify’s 5.0 release cycle simplifies multi-cloud orchestration by removing execution barriers. It integrates with Kubernetes, Azure ARM, AWS Cloud Formation, Ansible, and Terraform – effectively creating one consistent end-to-end automation, namely ‘Environment as a Service’. Larger organizations can now manage ongoing changes and update environments while minimizing duplicate work; this is primarily achieved by introducing new service modeling that allows a ‘plug n play’ environment composition across a mix of Cloud-Native, VM Based and SaaS services on Azure, AWS, GCP as well as VMware and OpenStack infrastructure. This new level of workflow and infrastructure visibility that works across multiple cloud infrastructures and DevOps frameworks gives users a simple and consistent method to monitor and troubleshoot their application delivery execution. 

EaaS in action

The Need for Change

Larger companies are serving many active departments, users and applications across their growing number of environments.  There is also a growing number of applications spread across multiple zones, regions and edge environments. This leads to unique scale challenges that most current application delivery and management systems built for a centralized environment simply cannot handle. 

This latest Cloudify release also marks a new generation of the flagship Cloudify product, featuring the optimization of a single Cloudify cluster that can now serve 10X more concurrent executions by moving to a cloud-native architecture; infinite scale through Cloudify Spire (which handles multi departments & site scale); and takes a cloud-native and public cloud-first approach by moving to a microservices architecture. To plunge into the technical, Cloudify now supports externals DBaaS and comes with built-in support AWS RDS, Azure SQL (as a public cloud DBaaS) as well as Patroni – a component of DB clustering- this makes the process of maintaining and upgrading, alongside healing, and/or scaling of the Cloudify cluster more robust and simple, especially as it relates to public cloud.  

As with all updates, the latest version of Cloudify also includes many more new features alongside security and stability improvements with over 240 stories introduced, and an additional 340 resolved issues and tasks. Access full release notes here.  

Client Created. Client Approved.

Did you know? Cloudify’s latest release has been developed in collaboration with major clients:

• A leading North American bank is using Cloudify to run their internal environment as a service which addresses many of their internal Jenkins CI/CD workloads. The environment is based on docker containers (as their main computing service), Ansible (for configuration management) and is now expanding into Azure.
• Another leading North American bank is using Cloudify to run their entire OpenStack infrastructure and is now using Cloudify to migrate workloads to Microsoft Azure with an aim to create a complete hybrid environment.
• A leading telco carrier is running Cloudify to manage its open network management environment and data analytics platform. Cloudify is managing a mixed environment that includes many Kubernetes clusters, VMs –  spread across various sites and environments.
• A European telco carrier is currently transforming all network management from a traditional telco vendor orchestration to open orchestration as part of their transition to a cloud-native strategy. Cloudify is providing a smooth transition that can automate existing VNF and modernize via integration with Ansible while also integrating with Kubernetes- handling a new generation of network services that are provided as cloud native services. During integration the client in question signed a big deal with Google. Cloudify’s multi-cloud support enables them to integrate their internal VMware and OpenStack infrastructure and now features added support for Google infrastructure without breaking current processes.
• A uCPE provider based in Asia is using Cloudify as its open management and orchestration platform to manage the lifecycle and configuration of their uCPE devices and additional services. Cloudify’s open uCPE approach enables the client to manage a mix of existing devices and new generation software-based appliances through a common management platform. In addition, Cloudify’s support for Intel, EPA acceleration (in both VM and Containers) is used to ensure a competitive cost/performance ratio of devices.

You can access the latest version of Cloudify (featuring ‘EaaS’) now or through a simple download from docker-hub of the open community and premium edition. You can also learn more about Cloudify through the new Getting Started and best practices demos.