Unify Cloud Control
By their very nature, cloud services are more than likely to be dispersed across a mixed IT landscape and perhaps widely distributed across different cloud technologies and geographies. One of the biggest challenges facing enterprises of all sizes will be “where are all my cloud services and how do I control them against my business requirements?”
senseTM and controlmycloud are architected to respond to this need to unify visibility, transparency and control of dispersed and distributed cloud services. Designed from the ground up to manage service health across general service interfaces, the sense solutions DO NOT hold a different conceptual view of cloud services whether they are IaaS, PaaS, SaaS services or distributed across private, pubic or hybrid cloud environments. In fact, sense was designed explicitly to cover the fast evolving case of hybrid clouds – to provide a ‘single pane of glass’ through which to provide a unified view and automated control of cloud services.
To date, the most requested example of this unified or federated cloud control covers the case for one or more data centers using elements of the VMware products to implement private clouds, and the use of Amazon AWS services (primarily storage and compute) particularly for experimentation of development and testing in the public cloud. There is also the beginning of real requirements to ‘burst’ from the private to the public cloud, and in some case to use the public cloud as part of business continuity strategies. In all these cases, and more, it will be hugely beneficial to both business and technical management to have a single view and control of service health across the various private and public clouds – effectively looking to hybrid cloud control.
At the heart of the sense family of solutions is the Cloud Map – a single view of all managed cloud services and their health status (against the declared business and technical SLAs). The screenshot below shows a hybrid cloud environment of private and public cloud services from VMware, Xen and Amazon AWS (EC2). While the cloud map offers automated ‘container’ views based on IaaS, PaaS and SaaS boundaries, it is configurable to allow the user to define any type of taxonomy and resource organization to represent the views in the most appropriate ways to the specific user audience. The cloud map can be customized for layout, iconography, container organization, and zooming (similar user navigation as Google Maps). Each cloud map view can be configured, saved and assigned to specific identity roles for secure visibility within your organization and perhaps to external users, partners, or customers.
