GigaSpaces Technologies has re-architected its Cloudify offering to provide ”intelligent orchestration” of applications in the cloud. With the product rewrite, the company says, the new Cloudify orchestration platform simplifies the application deployment, management and scaling experience on OpenStack, VMware vSphere and other clouds and environments.
According to GigaSpaces, in current orchestration models, most tools focus primarily on application installation, but the problem is that much of application management occurs after deployment, making it necessary to manually manage post-deployment processes such as monitoring and logging, leading to significant overhead, complexity and inconsistency across systems. The new orchestration model seeks to resolve this by introducing a feedback loop that automates fixes and updates without manual intervention, using single platform that integrates with any tool chain.
“To deliver this next generation, intelligent orchestration, we needed to rethink Cloudify’s design,” said Yaron Parasol, VP of product at GigaSpaces. “With a new language of code, adoption of industry standards and development of scalable and custom workflows, we created something that few are doing today - orchestration of the entire app lifecycle that encompasses both pre-deployment and post-deployment management with a single platform.”
Among the key capabilities in Cloudify 3.0 is the elimination of boundaries between orchestration and monitoring, providing a mechanism that automatically reacts to monitored events with appropriate corrective measures. Version 3.0 includes building blocks of custom workflows, a workflow engine, and a modeling language that enables the automation of any process and any stack.
Cloudify 3.0 also offers tighter integration with OpenStack technology and core services, including KeyStone, Neutron, Nova and Heat. The underlying design of Cloudify was re-architected to match the design principles of OpenStack services, including the rewriting of the core services in Python and leveraging common infrastructure building blocks such as RabbitMQ.
Cloudify 3.0 contains built-in plug-ins for VMware vSphere and Apache CloudStack, and will soon add plug-ins for vCloud and SoftLayer. It comes with an open plug-in architecture to support other clouds, including Amazon AWS, GCE and Linux containers such as Docker (plug-ins for all of which will be released in the coming few weeks). With Cloudify 3.0, users can span the same application across multiple cloud environments without creating a new Cloudify setup per environment.
The next release planned for the fourth quarter of 2014 will introduce monitoring and custom policies for automated triggering of such corrective measures to provide auto-healing and auto-scaling capabilities.
For additional details, go to www.gigaspaces.com.