Enter Open Source Cloud Management!

I have spent a lot of time in the past few years working on cloud management technology with various enterprise customers spanning verticals esp in financial services,insurance,healthcare & media.

This is an emerging field that had hitherto been dominated by proprietary vendors but with the acquisition and open sourcing of ManageIQ by Red Hat, the innovation dial is markedly moving in the direction of open source.

http://manageiq.org – is the community website. Red Hat productizes ManageIQ as CloudForms.

CMP’s become critically important as front (provisioning, integration, self service,workload optimization etc etc) and back office (reporting,billing,metering and chargeback) management capabilities become key for adoption and proliferation of technologies like OpenStack,AWS and even traditional virtualization.

What is a cloud management platform & why should anyone care?

The below is Gartner’s  definition of Cloud Management Platform.

A cloud management platform enables common management tasks on top of your virtual infrastructure, including:

• self-service portal and capabilities with granular permissions for user access
• metering and billing for chargeback and showback
• ability to provision new instances and applications for an application catalog or from image templates
• integration points with existing systems management, service catalogs and configuration management software
• the ability to control and automate the placement and provisioning of new instances based on business and security policies

Ref – http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/cloud-management-platforms

Two broad areas of applicability

First is managing virtual infrastructure..literally a management platform across your virtualized infrastructure. Things like monitoring, capacity mgmt & capacity planning (which are two significantly different things), compliance governance, automation, workflow automation; reporting, dashboards and chargeback. Everything around infrastructure management as far as virtualization goes.

Second solution area is around Cloud Enablement or Private & hybrid cloud computing. Self service (and under this umbrella provisioning new svcs & managing the lifecycle of those services) and then chargeback, metering and all those things that people think of as private cloud computing.

Let’s break it down further…

Broad areas of capabilities – governance, compliance, dashboards, process automation. Addressed a number of infra platforms..VMWare, RHEV, Hyper V, Amazon AWS..depending on the maturity or robustness of the APIs offered by the VM/Cloud provider. When ManageIQ was first started cloud was not in the lexicon of IT , this was around 7 years ago hence the heavy and robust focus on enterprise virtualization & concomitant workloads.

Key areas of functionality

Four key components..

1. Insight – Visibility into the infrastructure..so we have discovering, monitoring, consumption, utilization, reporting,chargeback, trending analysis etc
2. Control – Proactively enforce policies around compliance and governance. Things like patch policies, too many NICs in a DMZ or did not have the correct & certified version of an application. For instance, if you did not want servers running without a certain patch level in your production infrastructure, we could analyze that in realtime when the workload  discover that in realtime and intercept that start, stop it and then notify the appropriate roles that “this thing didn’t meet compliance”. 
3. Automate – As the name would have you believe, this does IT process automation. Workflows. Key areas are provisioning using a state machine. Right from – Cloning a VM, IP Address Assignment, CPU-Disk size assignment and then  monitoring the workload throughout its lifecycle was done using the Automate engine.
4. The fourth component and one that maybe you don’t think of as being that important but is a real differentiator is Integrate. This module deals with integrating the CMP engine into other management disciplines and ITIL systems. It is fairly straightforward to integrate ManageIQ into Enterprise Service Catalog projects like Remedy, IP Address Mgmt systems, CMDBs, Event Mgmt systems. There are bunch of those that ManageIQ has integrated with. Integration is bidirectional as well. System asking the CMP to do something (e.g provision a service catalog item that reflects a business app running on an  n-tier architecture) or have the CMP going back to get an approval from the system via the ManageIQ API.
   

   Architecture

   
   Lets get down into the guts of the product. It supports multiple & different infrastructure providers, ManageIQ collects and abstracts information (into what is called a virtual mgmt database) that would then be consumed by other areas of the product suite like Automation, Reporting and Access Control.

   So depending on the platform and the capabilities & APIs it exposes determine how deep the integration is with that platform. For instance VMWare and RHEV have rich APIs that let ManageIQ do a bunch of things across those platforms. Amazon AWS on the other hand has rudimentary or limited capabilities it exposes. So different levels of integration as mentioned above.

   On the Storage side, ManageIQ supports native integration with NetApp. For other storage vendors, ManageIQ uses an industry standard protocol as opposed to using a native protocol.

   ManageIQ classifies all of the data elements in the database, much like tags on a picture. Use this tagging for mgmt tagging to tag all of these elements. So db admins can just view & act on database workloads. What is cool is that you could use this from a business construct as well..for instance users in the Retail Banking line of business can only view Retail Banking workloads. You can slice and dice these things with configurable or discoverable tags or with business policy tags. This feature provides one an ability to create a tagging taxonomy that is based on business nomenclature and context.

   The project is delivered as a virtual appliance that uses RHEL. The  app is built on top of RHEL using Ruby & Ruby on Rails. The default DB is Postgres. 

   One simply imports the OVF. Virtual appliances can be horizontally scalable, failover, rollback, roll fwd. I have seen customers handle VM deployments from less than a 100 hosts and a 1000 VM’s to a 1000 hosts to tens of 1000s of VMs.

   You can hook up the server to whatever you use for A&A like an LDAP based like Active Directory so you are replicating roles and permissions in ManageIQ. It is all fairly seamless and instantaneous.

   Multiple locations are supported as far as distributed datacenter’s go.One can do federated across platforms like RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) & VMWare would see a single pane of glass or federated across geographical locations.

   Should my enterprise use ManageIQ?

   Clearly, if you are an infrastructure that leverages traditional virtualization infrastructure like VMware vSphere, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization; Or if you are deploying or considering private cloud infrastructure like OpenStack; or public cloud infrastructure like Amazon Web Services, an open source based, enterprise grade & highly robust offering like ManageIQ can help you manage all those environments via a single pane of glass, provide efficient cloud brokering capabilities and comply with business policies & processes to put you on the ramp to offer Anything-as-a-service. That’s nirvana as most computing infrastructures go today.As with anything Red Hat, the system is fully open source encouraging wide community that is only growing.