SOLUTION WHITE PAPER. Managing AWS. Using BMC Cloud Management solutions to enhance agility with control

Transcription

1 SOLUTION WHITE PAPER Managing AWS Using BMC Cloud Management solutions to enhance agility with control

2 Holden pulled himself a shot of espresso, flipped his bangs out of his eyes, and brushed a few stray artisanal veggie burger crumbs off his plaid shirt and skinny jeans. As he took a sip of the dark, steaming liquid, he reviewed his Amazon Web Services self-service portal with satisfaction. He was developing a new educational video game and needed more compute power. After months of going around in circles with his IT department, he finally decided to short-circuit the process and create an AWS account on his own. He needed to get his job done after all, and now he could. He pulled his headphones on top of his head, turned the music up on his smart phone, and got to work. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Cloud computing provides companies with tremendous flexibility, enabling fluctuating short-term and long-term resource needs to be met, while also optimizing the costs of service delivery. One key lever to maximize both agility and cost reduction is utilizing external cloud resources to augment an organization s internal resources. However, doing so also provides the opportunity for users to circumvent IT and requisition external cloud resources on their own. Proper planning and management will mitigate the risk of introducing provisioning and management redundancy and complexity, as well as security and compliance issues. BMC is aligned with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver world-class cloud management solutions that provide an integrated and extended toolset for enterprise cloud-based deployments. These innovative offerings enable IT to take advantage of the flexible, cost-effective, elastic IT infrastructure provided by AWS using BMC s comprehensive set of solutions for planning, building, and running enterprise IT environments. The combined solution provides an innovative framework to migrate and manage enterprise workloads in the cloud. Using BMC Cloud Management solutions to manage AWS infrastructure, you can:» Deploy full-stack, multi-tier applications on premises or to the AWS Cloud» Support multiple AWS regions and availability zones» Expose AWS-specifi c resources in your local service catalog» Seamlessly monitor and manage resources across all environments» Ensure automated or manual change approval, as appropriate» Comply with regulatory and operational confi guration and compliance rules With this joint solution come tangible benefi ts to business users and to IT:» Reduced up-front capital expenditures while managing existing IT» Seamless incorporation of AWS into an on-premise/off-premise architecture» Assurance of reliable cloud service performance for all users and services» Business-friendly, self-service portal for requesting new cloud services» Improvement in the relationships between business users and IT WHY ARE EMPLOYEES USING AWS? AWS offers a massive global computing infrastructure that is utilized by customers worldwide. Its scalable, reliable, and secure distributed computing infrastructure has been honed for over a decade. Amazon.com s multi-billion dollar retail business and transactional enterprise also runs on AWS. AWS ensures that enterprise IT organizations have access to capacity and power whenever and wherever they need it, improving their agility and time to market. No matter their company, employees use AWS, sometimes without IT oversight, for many of the same reasons:» The AWS cloud can be up and running within hours, while the non-cloud IT process for requesting and receiving resources can take weeks or months.» IT often refuses user requests for additional resources, and AWS does not.» Sometimes, IT simply does not have the necessary resources available, and even it does, users become frustrated while waiting for access to them (due to lengthy IT processes that involve confi guration rules or compliance requirements). There are a number of reasons why having your employees procure their own external resources poses a challenge for IT. However, they all come down to visibility and control. When employees go to outside suppliers without IT participation, IT does not have complete visibility and, consequently, cannot provide adequate access control, change management, performance management, or security. Standard configurations are not being deployed, which can cause disorder and

3 confusion. There is limited to no visibility into the level of service being delivered, and when issues arise, it s not clear whether a problem is in the AWS cloud, in the internet, or internal to the organization. A non-centralized solution also raises costs for the overall organization. THE SOLUTION By now, most IT organizations recognize that users are using AWS and they understand why. But how can they fix the challenge of managing these external resources? The answer lies in finding a holistic, unified management solution that provides complete visibility with automated control of both your on-premise resources and the AWS cloud. AWS AND BMC AWS delivers reliable, scalable, and cost-effective computing resources on which to deploy corporate applications and services. With the AWS cloud, users gain access to a suite of cloud-based services on demand. In this model, users pay for what is used, often with no up-front expenses, no long-term contracts, and no minimum commitments, making AWS a cost-effective way to extend the IT footprint. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management provides an operational model for the lifecycle of cloud services, whether they are running onpremise or in the cloud. Beginning with a user request, submitted through a self-service portal, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management manages the automated provisioning of full-stack, multi-tier applications and monitoring components for each cloud service. With its ability to provision to AWS, the solution can be configured to draw from the scalable resources of that external cloud environment to support a host of workloads from web hosting to internal applications to collaboration solutions. Once deployed, BMC Cloud Operations Management works in tandem with BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management to provide continuous visibility and control over these cloud services. The solution can be confi gured to provide unifi ed management of the cloud and on-premise services. CLOUD RESOURCE MANAGEMENT BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management provides a resource management layer that unifi es the consumption of heterogeneous infrastructure platforms. Through this layer, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management can leverage compute resources from AWS, as well as VMware vsphere, Citrix Xen, and other platforms, to provide a consistent end-user experience for requesting and managing service instances. To interact with each underlying platform, the resource manager relies upon one or more integration providers. For local virtualization infrastructures, such as VMware vsphere, Citrix Xen, and IBM LPARs, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management clones virtual machine (VM) instances from templates or creates blank VMs and provisions new operating systems on them. After initial provisioning, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management handles application deployments, patching, compliance, and remediation, all before making the new, fully-confi gured service instance available to the requesting user. In addition, after the service instance is deployed, the end user may initiate a change to the service, such as deploying additional soft ware, which is also carried out through the system. For off-premise cloud resources, such as AWS, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management performs the same provisioning, right outof-the-box. It procures the underlying resources, layers on the appropriate application stacks, and ensures confi guration and regulatory compliance before passing the cloud service to users, fully confi gured to meet their specifi c needs. This out-of-the-box integration in BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management supports AWS operations, including:» Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (Amazon EC2) instance creation and termination» EC2 instance starting and stopping» Selection of EC2 Security Group for fi rewall-like network access control» Selection of EC2 key pair for X.509 certifi cate-based authentication» Creation of public EC2 instances across multiple Amazon Regions and Availability Zones» Creation of EC2 instances in Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), with the ability to target specifi c VPC subnets» Association of public Elastic IP addresses with EC2 instances» Use of multiple Amazon credentials 1

4 The AWS integration allows end users to select applications to be deployed onto EC2 instances at the time of request, bolstering the set of available application and confi guration combinations, while also minimizing cloud administration. This includes the ability to collect application-specifi c parameters, such as port numbers, application passwords, database names, or any other dynamic data, and use them in the deployment of those applications. The integration facility also allows login credentials provided by the requesting user to be created on the provisioned EC2 instances. Therefore, end users (or cloud administrators) can choose the form of authentication they prefer for connecting to the EC2 instances provisioned for the service requests. For BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management to be able to perform these deployment actions, the AWS Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) would be pre-configured with the BMC agent. This enables BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management to automatically register new EC2 instances created from those AMIs for subsequent package deployment, patching analysis, and compliance measurement. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management requires network access to the EC2 instances in order to carry out its functions. This means that EC2 instances deployed into public Availability Zones must use Security Group permissions that permit access from BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management to TCP port Likewise, EC2 instances deployed into Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) must be in a public-facing subnet, have an Elastic IP address, or be accessible through a VPN connection from your private network to the VPC. UNIFIED PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT BMC Cloud Operations Management enables proactive performance management of individual cloud services or an entire virtual data center within the AWS cloud in the following ways:» Agentless monitoring. By installing a knowledge module for AWS CloudWatch, BMC Cloud Operations Management remotely monitors AWS instances. The solution provides unifi ed performance management for local and external cloud services, seamlessly integrating AWS cloud services with other services and applications across the hybrid data center.» Agent-based monitoring. By provisioning knowledge modules in the AWS cloud service, BMC Cloud Operations Management monitors both the AWS instances and the applications running within them. Through the knowledge modules, AWS cloud services performance data is sent back to the BMC Cloud Operations Management solution and seamlessly integrated with information on other services and applications in the hybrid data center.» Co-location. If you are running a larger Virtual Data Center within the AWS cloud, the BMC Cloud Operations Management solution can be installed within your AWS cloud environment, monitoring the performance of all the cloud services from within AWS.» End-user experience monitoring. You can leverage BMC End User Experience Management to monitor your application performance, from an end-user perspective, for applications running in the AWS cloud. End-user performance data can be integrated with application and infrastructure performance data within BMC Cloud Operations Management to rapidly and effi ciently provide context for performance issues and to quickly solve problems before they affect end users. The tight integration between BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management and BMC Cloud Operations Management ensures that services are monitored as soon as they are deployed. You can confi gure both to leverage confi guration change information and further accelerate problem isolation and repair. By consolidating performance and confi guration management of all cloud services whether internal or external these solutions maximize existing investments and integrate new technologies easily into the IT environment, thus reducing training and ongoing administrative costs, while also ensuring optimal service performance. APPLICATION MANAGEMENT Without automation, deploying and managing complex applications in external clouds or on-premise IT environments requires a great deal of manual effort and ongoing maintenance of script libraries. BMC automates the provisioning and known-good confi guration of application infrastructure, and the deployment of applications into that hybrid environment.» Application release automation. BMC Release Lifecycle Management manages the application release process, packages and executes deployments, and confi gures application environments across AWS and enterprise data centers. Soft ware development and IT operations teams can collaborate to deploy applications faster, and with fewer errors.» Cloud database services. BMC Database Automation creates ready-to-use database environments even complex Oracle RAC servers quickly and automatically. It eliminates the need for DBAs to maintain scripts to provision, patch, confi gure, and load database servers. On-premise and cloud databases are managed from one console, enforcing consistent standards and content. 2

5 By automating the deployment and confi guration of applications and databases, BMC Release Lifecycle Management and BMC Database Automation deliver applications that are immediately usable without extensive manual effort. Since it can otherwise take days or weeks to get applications up and running, BMC provides signifi cant value over other cloud management solutions. SUMMARY BMC Cloud Management solutions deliver optimal service performance across on-premise and Amazon-based cloud services and leverages internal and external resources for maximum flexibility. With BMC Cloud Management solutions, IT can automate provisioning of customized full-stacks for users, regardless of deployment location and optimize capital and operational expenditures in support of all business needs. By marrying the benefi ts of the flexible, agile AWS cloud with the control of BMC solutions, IT can meet and exceed the needs of the business. For more information, please visit: BUSINESS RUNS ON I.T. I.T. RUNS ON BMC SOFTWARE. Business runs better when IT runs at its best. Tens of thousands of IT organizations around the world from small and mid-market businesses to the Global 100 rely on BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) to manage their business services and applications across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. BMC helps customers cut costs, reduce risk and achieve business objectives with the broadest choice of IT management solutions, including industry-leading Business Service Management and Cloud Management offerings. For the four fiscal quarters ended December 31, 2012, BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion BMC, BMC Software, and the BMC Software logo are the exclusive properties of BMC Software, Inc., are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Offi ce, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other BMC trademarks, service marks, and logos may be registered or pending registration in the U.S. or in other countries. IBM is the trademark or registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Origin date: 01/13 * *