We are pleased to announce that CloudBolt is now available for deployment in the Google Cloud Launcher. This makes it easy to deploy and run CloudBolt in Google’s public cloud, where it can be connected to public cloud accounts and private virtualization systems providing a single pane of glass to provision, manage, and control VMs and other resources.
Enterprises have been using CloudBolt and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) together since CB added support for GCP in 2014. In particular, a major home improvement retailer exposes the CloudBolt UI to their 500 developers to provide self-service development environments on GCP, Azure, and VMware. Since CB also integrates with their other enterprise systems (such as Chef for config management, InfoBlox for IPAM, and ServiceNow for change management), they can achieve self-service IT without the developers needing to learn the nuances of these myriad technologies.
With this addition, CloudBolt is now available for deployment in the top three public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and GCP), as well as on-premises. Let us know if you want to deploy CloudBolt in any other public cloud and we’d be happy to help.
To get started, you can visit Google Launcher’s page for deploying CloudBolt. Or, if you’d like to try it in your own datacenter, you can download CloudBolt to get started today.
Hybrid Cloud Management Platform Provides Automation, Flexibility And Control
Pre-CloudBolt Problems
Because of the size and complexity of the infrastructure the IT team at a major multinational hotels company utilizes four different public clouds to deliver resources to their developers. They need the flexibility of multiple public clouds so they can use the platform that provides the optimal environment for each workload. Furthermore, the IT team needs to protect themselves against price increases and instabilities in any one public cloud. The challenge this created was that administrators needed to understand and use four different interfaces to locate, manage, and provision compute resources.
Automating VM Deployment
Prior to adopting CloudBolt, and before adopting public clouds, the IT organization turned to VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) for managing and deploying VMware servers to their developers. However, vRA’s lack of support for public cloud providers such as Azure ARM, CenturyLink, and Google Compute Engine left the IT organization unable to automate VM deployments.
CloudBolt provided this hotel group with a single user interface and API through which they can now deploy complex applications to any of the four public clouds they use, manage these apps and their constituent servers over the course of their lifecycle, and automate their business policies and best practices surrounding server deployment and management.
Service Catalog Use
After the IT team got developers spun up using CloudBolt to provision individual VMs, they focused on getting users into the service catalog. Their IT group has built blueprints in CloudBolt for deploying 40+ node Apache Hadoop clusters to the public cloud. After being deployed, these services can be scaled-up and -down from CloudBolt, and eventually decommissioned.
Since CloudBolt has native Chef Enterprise integration, they are able to perform these tasks without the end user needing to separately work in the Chef UI. CloudBolt coordinates the bootstrap of the Chef agent on new VMs, associates nodes with the proper roles in Chef, and checks for success or failure of the Chef runs.
The Future
Today, the company is managing all of their public cloud VMs within CloudBolt and is focusing on providing more developers access as they scale. Phase 2 of their CloudBolt deployment will be to completely replace vRA with CloudBolt to manage their entire infrastructure from a single vendor-agnostic portal.
With more public cloud options available than ever, many enterprise IT shops are utilizing multiple providers (along with internal datacenters) to enable the business. These hybrid cloud approaches are the perfect example of why Cloud Management Platforms exist. Often, you don’t want to tie yourself to one cloud vendor, so having a single management pane for all of your resources makes sense.
But what if you’re only using hypervisors running on company-owned hardware? What if your security team laughed you out of the room for suggesting public clouds? What if your financial analysis resulted in cloud usage being the worse option?
Despite the name “CloudBolt”, we don’t require the use of cloud technologies. In fact, many of our customers exclusively use a single hypervisor, like VMware, Openstack, or XenServer, but still derive incredible value from placing CloudBolt in front of their internal datacenters. Here are a few ways we can help your IT team manage and control your virtual resources:
Self-Service IT Portal
One of the main causes of “Shadow IT” is the perception of users that the cloud is easy and virtualization is hard. Can you imagine the provisioning process from their perspective, and really blame them for this line of thinking? CloudBolt allows IT admins to set up simple order forms for users, configuration details of their servers, and direct console and SSH/RDP access without giving a user direct logins to the hypervisor, CMDB, or other IT utilities.
Orchestration of Standard Operating Procedures
One of the reasons IT doesn’t let users deploy their own resources is due to the surrounding processes involved in provisioning, management, and decommissioning a VM. This can include updating DNS, entering a record in your CMDB, installing specific agents, security configurations, or joining a domain. CloudBolt can automate all of these steps through Orchestration Actions, which means that every process is followed every time, regardless of who is performing the action.
Approval Processes, Group Quotas and Expiration Dates
Most VM requests must be approved by both a technical team and a management team. This process can take as long (if not longer) than the actual task, much to the dismay of the requestor. By using CloudBolt in front of your virtual environment, the technical team can set up order forms in such a way that only technically-approved systems can even be ordered. Managers can also have access to the CloudBolt interface, which allows them to approve or deny orders that their team requests. Additionally, teams can have a set limit of each resource, which forces users to really consider the necessity of each request. Expiration dates can further guard against VM sprawl for servers and services that should be short-lived.
Future Flexibility
Even if you’re currently using a single hypervisor today, the cloud is here to stay. Maybe you’re dabbling in cloud usage, or a new project that is coming up may work better with short-lived workloads. By having CloudBolt in place already, you can easily add new Resource Handlers and have certain users start provisioning in those public clouds by using the same interface they are used to. Since CloudBolt connects to so many different clouds, you can pick the backend that fits your needs.
One of our customers sent this to us this morning:
VMware snapshots are an extremely useful feature for saving the state of a VM and being able to roll back. They are nearly instantaneous to create, and reverting to a snapshot is also very fast. They do have one huge drawback though – when they exist for more than a few days, they can take up more and more space, and affect performance of your infrastructure. This performance hit is incurred not just by VM with the snapshots but other VMs as well, since the presence of snapshots increases the number of disk reads & writes necessary to work with the filesystem, and also increases CPU load on the host as it calculates deltas between data.
This wouldn’t be a problem if people who took snapshots deleted them shortly after creating them, but they have a tendency to be forgotten. In a large IT environment, with multiple datacenters, vCenters, clusters, and many VMs, it can be hard to figure out how many snapshots are out there, how old they are, how much they are affecting performance, and to enforce a policy of periodic expiration and automatic deletion of these.
We had this exact problem in our labs at CloudBolt (where we have every version of vCenter & ESX since 4.1 running), so we decided to automate a solution for this with a CloudBolt rule.
This rule condition looks at all VMs known to CloudBolt, searches for snapshots on them that were created more than the threshold number of days ago, and reports on them. If the Dry Run flag is set to False, the rule will also initiate a deletion of these snapshots.
We ran this rule a week ago against our labs, starting with a large threshold to delete the oldest of our snapshots. We thought we had been doing a good job of cleaning snapshots up as we went, but, as it turned out, there were a lot of snapshots, and some very old ones. Over the course of a day, we decreased this threshold, reran the rule, and repeated.
We immediately noticed a performance improvement in our labs, some of our automated CIT tests that were failing with timeouts began succeeding, and all our developers, SEs, and other users of our infrastructure became happier.
After all the old snapshots were cleaned up, we set the rule to run nightly and delete any snapshot older than 14 days, ensuring that this problem does not affect us again.
Today, CloudBolt is releasing 6.1-alpha4, which comes with this rule built-in. To upgrade to this alpha release, navigate in your CloudBolt UI to Admin > Version & Upgrade Info (or download the upgrader from our support site). After upgrading, go to Admin > Rules where you can change the inputs to this rule and execute it. It starts with Dry Run enabled, so it will not delete any snapshots automatically.
Hybrid Cloud Management Platform Yields Major Cost Savings
CloudBolt customers are deriving great benefit from using the product and we want to share some of their stories. We cannot use all of their names publicly due to confidentiality agreements, but hopefully this series of posts will be useful to you. These are their stories…
Pre-CloudBolt Problems
In 2014, the IT team at one of the top home supply retailers looked around and realized that they were spending an average of 1-2 weeks to provision VMs for their end users and had a growing shadow IT problem. They decided to evaluate cloud management platforms (including CloudBolt, VMWare’s vRA, and a couple of others) to see if one of these CMPs could help them address their challenges. After an exhaustive evaluation, they chose CloudBolt and told us that they were impressed by its simplicity, extensibility, elegance, and its low overhead to install, upgrade, and maintain. We’ve been working with them to transform their IT operations for the better since then.
Automating VM Deployment
Before adopting CloudBolt, the IT org received requests from end users (~400 developers) to build new VMs in VMware, and the IT team did this with a manual step by step process (which was both time consuming and error prone). The first step in their IT transformation was to automate these builds using CloudBolt and greatly reduce the time to provision, from 1-2 weeks to < 20 minutes. Within this company, end users’ esteem for the IT organization started to grow, and the need for shadow IT diminished.
Self-Service
After the IT team had used CloudBolt to fulfill requests for a few months, they decided they did not need to play the middle man anymore. They felt that the CloudBolt user interface made the process simple enough and had the guard rails they needed (quota system, expiration dates, per-environment & group customized order forms, predefined sets of options so the users cannot free-form enter inappropriate values) for the ~400 developers to use CloudBolt directly. The developers instantly loved being able to order what they wanted when they wanted it. They also started de-provisioning these VMs proactively and of their own volition, since they knew they could always create new VMs whenever they needed to. With the developers provisioning servers on their own, the IT team was freed from their most manual, repetitive tasks and able to focus more energy on best practices, architecture, and security.
Public Cloud Adoption
Now, this company is expanding from VMware into the public cloud (focusing on Azure and Google Cloud) and CloudBolt is catalyzing that transition. Since the developers already know how to use CloudBolt and enjoy doing so, the IT group can simply enable a few more environmental choices for those users and they can rapidly spin up and down workloads there. No extra training was needed to make the transition, and no extra process was added.
In terms of its effect on shadow IT, the cloud architect at this customer said: “[CloudBolt] helped us bring some of that shadow IT out. When we introduced this, we couldn’t put our finger on how big that need was. Previously, they were running VMs on local laptops, repurposing DC machines, spinning public cloud VMs. Immediately those shadow IT things went away, and those people starting using the service we offered. Instead of being dictatorial, we ask what they need and make sure it’s managed and they can focus on delivering value.”
The Future
Today, this company is managing about 10,000 VMs with CloudBolt and excited to be rolling more and more environments with the product (including automating the build-out of store servers).
A press release went out this morning announcing our new Cloud Bursting feature that is coming out in CloudBolt 6.0 next month (early access releases are available today). We are honored to be able to provide this capability and are in a great position to do so – with support for 14 different resource handlers (virtualization systems and public clouds), four load balancers, and a powerful system for customer-driven extensibility, CloudBolt is well suited to make Cloud Bursting a reality. This will lead to simpler management of hybrid environments, decreased cost of ownership for applications (own the only base, rent the spike), and increased confidence in the resilience of important applications.
Take a look at the explainer video that includes a demo of Cloud Bursting, and contact us if you have questions, want to see a live demo, or download the product.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMTRGVdyeNM[/embedyt]
Today, Cisco announced its intent to acquire CliQr, for a reported $260M. This acquisition validates the importance that Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs) play in enterprise IT shops, forming the foundation of a hybrid cloud strategy.
What prompted this move on CliQr’s part? (more…)