🌋 🐰 🚟 Morpheus Red Cloud Management Tablet 🎅🏿 🌦️ 🦌

The economy is stagnating, buckwheat deficit in stores, companies are forced to reduce equipment purchases ... However, computing power is still needed. Here it is, the very moment when you need to make the most of cloud resources. We tested many hybrid cloud management systems in our lab and chose the best. It turned out to be the leader of the Gartner quadrant in the field of CPM - the Morpheus platform. We argue below.

Reconcile three IT heroes

The easiest way is to get resources in a public cloud (for example, Amazon or Mail.ru): just register, enter a credit card number, and then everything works by itself. In the case of a private or hybrid cloud, the situation is more complicated. In corporate IT, three key departments interact with the allocation of computing resources: development, infrastructure, and information security. And each of these areas has its own requirements and priorities.

1. Developers

Most of all “necessary” comes from them. Development and testing is generally the most dynamic part of the IT infrastructure. The main desire of developers is that the changes that make (creation of new environments, reconfiguration, etc.) should occur as quickly as possible.

One critical aspect here is the use of the infrastructure-as-a-code (IaC) approach. The logical development of IaC is the so-called immutable infrastructure: the created objects do not change during operation, but are recreated if some parameters need to be adjusted. Thus, automation gives more than speed.

2. IT Infrastructure Administrators

They are not so much interested in speed as stability and productivity, as well as observing the “correctness” of configurations (compliance with accepted standards, practices, policies). Mentioned IaC helps significantly reduce the proportion of routine operations.

3. Information Security Specialists

Often, information security experts are afraid of automation solutions, believing that they carry serious risks. Include them in the process of developing and coordinating scenarios. As a result, if they meet the security requirements, then the services provided in these scenarios can also be trusted.

Service Menu

When starting automation, it is important to focus on those services that are most often required and absorb the most labor costs. Pay attention to all three components of DevSecOps: what development does, what the system administration department lives in and what operations are most often requested, which is critical for information security and why. Do not duplicate the entire functionality of the administration tools in the orchestra: system administrators will still use their usual tools to perform fine-tuning. Focus on what users need.

The catalog of services presented below is just a private example, and its structure may change from organization to organization.

So, one team just needs to automatically create virtual machines, and someone needs off-the-shelf application components or development stacks. By automating typical administrative tasks, for example, creating user groups with resource quotas for them, you can delegate these tasks to end users.

It should not be forgotten that the automation project is more a development than the introduction of a boxed product. Therefore, it is advisable to break down the process of implementing a cloud management system into stages or releases. If you don’t manage to eat the whole elephant, the project risks becoming endless.

How does the cloud help?

In almost every second organization, we meet with development teams that desperate to wait for access to the environments. They begin to use some kind of cloud solutions: either external or deploy their own. So that very “shadow IT” appears, where there is no question of compliance with IS requirements.

Isn't it more logical to provide the cloud service that developers need and protect corporate data? At the same time, it is important that internal policies and configuration rules adopted by the organization are applied to external resources. This can be achieved either by the hard work of administrators, or by using a suitable tool - a hybrid cloud management platform.

This is what the hybrid cloud architecture looks like using a similar tool:

Morpheus Hybrid Cloud Management Platform Helps Build Development Teams with IT and IS Unlike many solutions, Morpheus allows you to use the usual administrative tools, and access to automation scripts can be organized both through the portal and through the API or CLI. The system broadcasts user requests to the computing resources of private and public clouds and at the same time receives feedback from them to form an overall picture of the consumption of IT resources.

Why invest in it at all?

First of all, it is a quick allocation of resources. The same time-to-market.

Secondly, the environment is ensured with the simultaneous control of parameter changes in them and versioning.

Third - control of resource consumption and costs.

And any cyclical operations often lead to systematic errors. Therefore, an additional "side" effect will be a decrease in the routine load on admins. Automation of processes for this was invented in order to minimize the human factor.

How is the allocation of a virtual machine on demand? In a large company, a lot of people are involved in this process, numerous applications are created (or even design decisions), the machine is registered in all kinds of AD, CMDB, set up for backup and monitoring, network accesses are opened, rights are assigned to users, etc. In reality, there can be several more such applications with a long approval process. But the automated process of allocating a virtual machine collapses to a very simple scheme. We get both acceleration and the elimination of human errors.

Why exactly Morpheus?

The market for Cloud Management Platform class products is growing rapidly. Before our eyes, a generational change has practically taken place. The first solutions included well-developed orchestrators with the ability to program anything. But at the same time, the complexity and cost of projects for their implementation were cosmic: out of the box, they knew almost nothing.

Now the leaders of the Gartner quadrant take a different path - they focus on the management task and virtual environments and development needs. This somewhat limits flexibility and capabilities, therefore, low-demand 10-15% of services will not be implemented. But the remaining 85% will be able to do much faster.

We tested the Morpheus system and other similar products in our laboratory . And against the background of “classmates”, it compares favorably with just the capabilities “out of the box”, the speed of implementation and the sharpening of local infrastructure management (as opposed to purely SaaS solutions).

There are more than 80 box-based integrations here. Among them are both open source solutions and products from the enterprise world: configuration management systems (Ansible, Puppet, Chef), backup systems (Veeam, Commvault, etc.), network equipment (Citrix, F5 and even Cisco ACI), virtualization platforms (vSphere, Hyper-V, OpenStack), infrastructure services (DNS, IPAM). Of course, not all integrations are worked out perfectly, but they are quite functional and carry out their tasks.

Do not forget that, although automation and optimization of IT processes is the first and important plus of such a solution, both high-quality monitoring and resource control are urgently needed. Morpheus has not only the ability to generate reports, but also the analysis of the sufficiency / redundancy of the ordered resources, control of budget expenditures, etc. And of course there is support in the software for “second-day operations” (day-2 actions) for those loads that require it (while most of these).

In our opinion, it was the mix of the functionality described above that allowed the platform to gain a foothold in the leaders of the Gartner quadrant.

We will see?

Posted by Vyacheslav Medvedev, Head of Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure Automation, Jet Infosystems.

Morpheus Red Cloud Management Tablet