With each release of CloudBolt, we introduce new features, enhance existing ones, and fix issues brought to our attention from our customers. We also want to thank a CloudBolt Champion and recognize their efforts in making us the market-leading hybrid cloud management solution for enterprises and organizations.

This release is named after Ricardo Lupi Nogueira from NOS, a leading media company in Portugal. As a Solutions Architect for NOS, he’s explained to us that CloudBolt’s environment concept and plugin-based orchestration is what really empowered him to do his work; it’s flexible enough that it lets him customize VM provisioning for each client.

In this new release of CloudBolt, we’ve focused on richer connections to cloud environments as many of our customers continue to expand their environments in new and existing private and public clouds. We’ve added new and enhanced support for our most widely used Resource Handlers—AWS, MS Azure, Google Cloud, OpenStack, and VMware.

Here are some of the main highlights:

AWS

Reserved Instances—When EC2 instances running in AWS have a predictable pattern of resource usage over time, they are often good candidates to use cost-saving, AWS reserved instances. Instead of AWS billing on a pay-as-you-go on-demand rate, the reserved instances have a set price that is lower if you pay for them ahead of time, partially or in full. CloudBolt now provides support for recommending reserved instances based on the past days of usage you set over your subscription duration. CloudBolt will list the EC2 instance candidates and then provide recommendations based on your current spending and what you can save.

Multiple Region Support

AWS GovCloud and AWS China—Along with our ongoing updates to our main AWS resource handler, we have support for two special AWS resource handlers and corresponding environments. In prior releases, we supported only one region for each resource handler. In this release, we now have the ability to support multiple regions for these resource handlers. AWS GovCloud has two regions and AWS China has several.

Azure

Resizing VMs—This release supports a new server action that resizes Azure virtual machines. For example, your VM might have only 3 or 4 disks available and you need more. You can go to the server page for an Azure VM, click Resize VM, and then select a new size rather than having to rebuild an entirely new VM just to have more disks.

Scale Sets—Virtual machines that are members of Azure Scale Sets will now be synchronized to CloudBolt. Scale sets in Azure are sets of identical VMs that provide specific services that need to scale with demand to run efficiently. They scale up with increased demand and then scale back down as necessary so they are not running continuously in a ready state.

Google Cloud

Multiple GCP Projects—The release supports synchronizing multiple Google Cloud Platform (GCP) projects using the Google Compute Engine resource handler. You can choose which GCP projects you’d like CloudBolt to manage by clicking the Fetch Projects button from the Projects tab of the resource handler.

OpenStack

Snapshots—You can now take a snapshot of an OpenStack instance in CloudBolt and revert back to it at any time. The open-source nature and customization often involved with OpenStack can get very tedious without the ability to preserve stable instances in an iterative process instead of having to rebuild the instance from scratch. To take a snapshot of an OpenStack server in CloudBolt, click “Create Snapshot” server action available on the server details page. To revert the server back to a snapshot, click “Revert to Snapshot” server action on the server details page.

VMware

IPv6—When synchronizing virtual machines to servers from VMware VSphere to CloudBolt, both IPv6 addresses in addition to IPv4 addresses will be considered. There are also new options in the Miscellaneous tab that allow you to select using IPv4 or IPv6 addresses for remote scripts or let the resource handler select the preferred one from vCenter.

Other Cool Stuff

Spelling—In larger deployments, the efficiency of tagging with the correct strings for tag values is critical but often plagued with spelling errors that make it difficult to manage sets of VMs based on specific tags for business units, billing inquiries, and any number of other factors. From the Tag tab in this new release, you can configure the common spelling errors to be mapped to the correct spelling.


When the tags are synchronized to the target environment, the tag values are corrected. This new feature has been added to AWS, Azure, and VMWare resource handlers.

Plugin Code—We’ve added the ability to revert plugin code back to the Out-of-the-box version, which will save time in having to copy and paste to a backup editor. To use this feature, go to a provided plugin or remote script which has edits made to the code and click “Revert Changes.”

CloudBolt Release Notes

For more detailed information about all the new features and enhancements, see the Release Notes.

Understanding and implementing repeatable patterns effectively is what adds value to any operation, whether it’s making a pizza, conducting a symphony, or building applications at scale using a hybrid, multi-cloud modular approach.

Watching a pizza made in a fast-paced delivery shop is a real testament to having sets of ready-made components available to make and deliver at scale. Dough, cheese, tomato sauce, meats, vegetables, and other toppings need to be assembled and shoved in the oven without delay. This makes all the difference in delivering a pizza within the popular time frame of 30 minutes or less. A conductor of a symphony, in a slightly different scenario, has access to modular components that make up the desired sound from brass, string, woodwind, percussion, and even vocal instruments. He or she relies on the readiness of the musicians and their instruments in a modular way.   

The ability to duplicate these approaches of modularity plays a huge role in delivering an optimal hybrid and multi-cloud strategy to help developers get the resources they need to deliver digital value to the market with the required components at scale. As complexity increases, the need for modularity also increases. Having these ready-made sets of resources to deliver hundreds of made-to-order items will not be the same as delivering only plain cheese pizzas, a single score of music, or simple sets of VMs to internal users of an organization.

When it comes to delivering a complex set of resources with requirements for configuration, security, and cost controls, a modular approach will have a huge impact on a successful outcome. It’s very inefficient if, after a pizza delivery, you had to add all the special ingredients. Likewise, with an application stack that includes VMs, you wouldn’t want to have to add all the configuration settings, patches from an OS update, or any other item that would be better delivered at the time of provisioning and orchestrating the resources.

Integrating the Process of Modular Design

When it comes to provisioning infrastructure resources in modern enterprises, the complexity compared to making a pizza will only go so far but illustrates the need for modularity. Each set of resources required by developers and DevOps teams will vary depending on the operating systems, the location of the virtual machines, the number and size of the virtual machines, as well as all the ingredients that are more abstract—like connecting the hosts to a network or adding them to a domain.

Consider these key aspects of a good modular approach:

Resource Connections

Resource connections are configured integrations with the target environments. Instead of having to log in and provision resources in each separate environment, you can go to one location and have a ready-made connection to the environment that has the required features you want configured ahead of time. Most cloud management platforms, like CloudBolt, have these ready-made connections. Each cloud management provider will have varying depths of coverage with each of the target resources.  

Environments

Once you’ve connected to a specific cloud resource, another level of modularity is the ability to create specific environments that you know are the most common and have the specific setting for that environment already set up. For example, you could create specific environments that do not have public IP addresses available to configure for some of the users in your environment. This provides a level of security from accidentally making an environment subject to malicious attacks.

Configurations

It’s very common for enterprise level provisioning to use one of the popular configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, or Saltstack. Having these tools integrated as modular connections to your resource provisioning will make the process go smoother. These sets of tasks can be grouped and called for whatever application stack is needed for a set of internal users like developers or DevOps engineers.

User Access

Managing users in an enterprise environment is no simple task. Within the organization, there is usually an Active Directory service or LDAP system that is used to manage user access to many of the enterprise tools used by most organizations. Connecting to those environments is a good way to re-use existing user permissions. Taking it one step further, when provisioning, these user profiles can be the basis for the modular groups to manage in a cloud provisioning process. Similar to restricting the ability to not expose public IPs in some environments, sets of users could require an approval process to provision resources.

CloudBolt Can Help

CloudBolt provides one place for all of these modularization strategies to be implemented. In addition, CloudBolt provides an extensible plugin in architecture that helps you modularize any provisioning activity you require. Once you identify a set of repeatable steps, you can create a plugin that executes them.

Ready to see it for yourself? Request a demo!