GigaSpaces Enhances Production Readiness, with Focus on Hybrid Cloud and NFV, in Latest Release of Cloudify

The latest version of Cloudify, the open source, multi-cloud orchestration software based on the TOSCA standard, is now available, bringing with it a multitude of upgrades and new features focused on production readiness, NFV, and Hybrid Cloud orchestration. These features include greater scalability, better security, access control, and offline installation.

The current state of production readiness for mission critical deployments is fragmented with heterogenous architectures and fractured tool sets. Cloud orchestration with Cloudify 3.3 enables application deployment and management on all major clouds with any tooling, providing a single pane of glass for these complex systems. “We’re really excited about this release that has improved production and operational stability significantly. Seeing how Cloudify is increasingly being used in enterprise and NFV environments, we have gained a lot of insights about what would make it easier to operate and maintain. On top of this, we’ve rolled out numerous new features and integrations around multi-cloud, containers and NFV orchestration, all while strengthening security to meet our clients’ demands.” says Uri Cohen, Head of Product at GigaSpaces.

New 3.3 production readiness features include:

• 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.

Hybrid Cloud and Heterogeneous Workloads

As a pure-play cloud orchestration tool, Cloudify is built to work with multiple cloud environments and on any cloud infrastructure. In this release the Cloudify team implemented a significantly richer support for AWS, including full VPC support, as well as new Azure and GCP integrations. In addition, the Cloudify team developed a plugin for the Kubernetes container management framework, which allows users to setup Kubernetes on any cloud, and then use it in conjunction with non-containerized portions of a user’s application to allows for mixed workloads. Cloudify also has tight Docker integration which makes it easy to model Docker-based workloads and deploy Docker containers on any cloud.

OpenStack also recently introduced Murano with their latest release, Liberty. OpenStack Murano is an app catalog that allows you to install OpenStack plugins with one click. Working Jointly with the Murano team, the Cloudify team has recently built a plugin to extend Murano to any cloud as well as manage TOSCA blueprints directly from within the Horizon dashboard.

NFV

NFV orchestration has been another focus with the latest release of Cloudify. It is the only open source tool that meets the demanding requirements of NFV and can fulfill the NFV MANO vision of ETSI. Cloudify has been used by Deutsche Telekom and other tier-1 operators in this regard, as well being integrated into OPNFV.

Recently, Cloudify demonstrated a working vIMS with Clearwater at the OPNFV Summit. Also at the Summit this year, the OPNFV Functest team described Cloudify as the only tool that was able to orchestrate an entire automated lifecycle management cycle for their IMS application.

Cloudify Composer

Also included in this update is the official release of the Cloudify Composer (previously Blueprint Composer). The Composer is a tool that offers a GUI to build and design blueprints using a drag and drop interface. This enables the creation of complex blueprints in a much more simple and efficient manner.