Cloudify Releases Orchestration-First Cloud Management Platform

On Wednesday, Cloudify unveiled a new version of their open source multi-cloud management software, Cloudify 4. The tool, a full-featured Cloud Management Platform (CMP), boasts new updates for app developers and power users.

Cloudify 4 reportedly takes an “orchestration first” approach to cloud management and brings key features of CMP, PaaS and orchestration platforms together into one. The new version allows for a number of possible users, including both power users and developers who prefer a tool with features similar to PaaS solutions. Cloudify 4 also offers an app catalog, multi-tenancy support, user-managed and role-based security, along with enhanced clustering and high availability, according to the vendor.

Cloudify 4’s orchestration-first approach combines “features of a CMP with PaaS-like functionality and powerful orchestration capabilities in a shared environment.”

Here are some additional key features provided by the vendor:

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.

Current Cloudify 3 users have already tested Cloudify 4 and have chosen it as their CMP going forward. It delivers built-in support for container frameworks like Docker, plus it supports common microservices architectures via a model-driven approach.

The vendor claims that this new version is a “direct threat to legacy cloud management platforms (CMPs) used by enterprises since the earliest days of cloud.”

For more information, the Cloudify team will present a Cloudify 4 features webinar on April 27 at 11 a.m.