Cloudify Releases 4th Iteration of Orchestration-First Cloud Management Platform

The latest version of Cloudify open source multi-cloud management software-Cloudify 4-ships today, with new features that present a direct threat to legacy cloud management platforms (CMPs) used by enterprises since the earliest days of cloud. These legacy CMPs-such as RightScale and CloudForms-are showing their age now that orchestration-first approaches like Cloudify have matured, adding CMP features and enhanced performance in the latest version. Cloudify 4 is available for download here.

Orchestration-First CMP

CMPs were built to satisfy central IT demands for control, and PaaS platforms were built to satisfy casual developer demands for ease of use. Orchestration platforms, by contrast, were built to satisfy power user demands for advanced automation and lifecycle management.

Cloudify 4 takes an "orchestration first" approach to cloud management, bringing the key capabilities of all three approaches into one platform. The new version expands the number of potential users to include not just power users, but developers who prefer PaaS-like features such as a simple, one-click portal and integration with CI/CD processes.

 

With these updates, Cloudify 4 emerges as an orchestration-first CMP. It delivers an application catalog, multi-tenancy support, user-managed and role-based security, and enhanced clustering and high availability. It also provides new monitoring and analytics via a customizable portal, equipping Cloudify 4 to address the needs of business unit users and IT operations, not just power users.

Read more about The End of Cloud Management.

Cloudify 4 Webinar

The Cloudify team will present Cloudify 4 features and orchestration-first CMP capabilities in a webinar on Thursday, April 27th, at 11AM, EDT. Register to participate and ask questions.

How Cloudify 4 is Different From Traditional CMPs and PaaS Platforms

Traditional CMPs like RightScale and CloudForms target infrastructure management and IT operations. PaaS platforms like Cloud Foundry and OpenShift target developers, enabling deployment from IDEs to the cloud. Orchestration tools like Terraform have largely been targeted at high-end DevOps users that are looking for infrastructure automation. These differences mean enterprises have chosen different management platforms for these two groups. This has led to cloud management silos and a lack of collaboration between developers and central IT.

The orchestration-first approach offered by Cloudify 4 combines the traditional features of a CMP with PaaS-like functionality and powerful orchestration capabilities in a shared environment. In so doing, Cloudify 4 eliminates cloud management silos.

Cloudify Momentum in 2017

Revenue targets for Cloudify in the first quarter of 2017 were surpassed by 60 percent, with a record number of seven-figure subscription deals signed. The company also reports steady customer growth among both enterprises and top-tier telcos.

Current users of Cloudify 3-including carriers and enterprises-have participated in Cloudify 4 testing and evaluation and have already selected it as their go-forward cloud management platform.

New Features For Operators

●        The multitenant self-service portal provides a central interface to control who gets access to the environment and which resources they may access.

●        Application/service reporting tools monitor the key performance indicators per application.

●        Activity monitoring provides insights into activity per user per application over time.

●        Enhances security via SSL-based communications among multi-cloud environments.

New Features For Application Developers

●        Catalog of services widgets provides an easy way for developers to select and activate their target environment through a set of self-managed services, without requiring intimate knowledge of the "certified" tools or infrastructure.

●        Built-in integration enables support for popular frameworks and cloud environments, including container frameworks such as Docker and Kubernetes.

●        Simple CLI experience provides the ability to run an application through a command line interface from a local desktop environment for development and testing purposes.

●        One-click consumable provisioning of resources and tooling through a simple service catalog UI.

●        Dynamic, customizable user experience via a fully configurable UI framework.

New Features For Power Users

●        Model-driven blueprints provide the interface for automating all key components and workflows needed to manage the application and interface with the underlying resources that comprise the application.

●        Model-driven design provides RESTful API access to all the resources exposed in the cloud management system, from the infrastructure resources to the monitoring system-north- and southbound, as well as east and west.

●        The extension through plug-in capability provides an interface to extend the cloud management system to support any API endpoint or resources that need to be part of the application lifecycle.

●        A highly customizable CLI interface offers popular and easy choices for integration with the build system.

Cloudify 4 delivers built-in support for container frameworks like Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos for infrastructure automation, service orchestration, and hybrid stack support. It supports common microservices architectures through a model-driven approach in which microservices are modeled as a self-managed service.

Cloudify 4 ships with innovations in network orchestration that are application driven, opening the door for a new model for addressing network security, specifically in multi-cloud scenarios. As a founding member of the Open Network Automation Platform project, Cloudify will continue investing in this area.