Use the cloud to manage your cloud

Posted on August 12, 2014 by Alastair

Since hybrid clouds are all the rage right now it seems appropriate that there is a public cloud service that lets you easily manage your private cloud. Platform9 has just launched product to do exactly this.

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The aim is to make a self service cloud management tool deploy in a few minutes. There are two parts, the cloud service and an agent. The cloud service is OpenStack based and provides compute, network, storage and VM image management. The agent gets deployed onto your hypervisor in your datacentre. At launch this will support only KVM but the near term plan includes vSphere support with Docker and who know what else in the future.

IT administrators will signup to Platform9 and then deploy the agent onto their hypervisors. Then some users need to be created in the web service for the people who will provision VMs. To control the provisioning the administrator sets policies including who can deploy where and what quotas apply. In a few minutes, to hours, a private cloud has been built without the need to learn or deploy a cloud management platform. Cloud management as a service.

This should help IT organizations where development teams are using AWS because the internal IT cannot respond fast enough to VM provisioning requests. At this stage the resulting cloud provides VMs deployed from templates, basic IaaS. This isn’t an AWS competitor, are no added services like message queuing, load balancing or database. Of course the company has just announced it’s first product so I shouldn’t be too demanding.

I like the idea of management products being SaaS, the benefits of always being on the latest version are huge. There is also a huge benefit to the vendor as their developers get a lot more feedback about how the product is being used by real customers. On the other hand I am a little concerned when my management infrastructure isn’t entirely under my control. One good thing about Platform9 is that they don’t expect you to stop using your existing management tools, this is an additional tool.

© 2014, Alastair. All rights reserved.

About Alastair

I am a professional geek, working in IT Infrastructure. Mostly I help to communicate and educate around the use of current technology and the direction of future technologies.
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