Taxonomy of Cloud Management Platforms

White Paper Taxonomy of Cloud Management Platforms Discover which cloud automation system is best suited for your enterprise By Scott Hogg

Taxonomy of Cloud Management Platforms This white paper will cover the following topics and help you understand how to select a Cloud Management Platform for your enterprise. Enterprises continuously strive to be more efficient and increase their Information Technology (IT) staff productivity and speed of application deployments while IT budgets continue to remain flat or decrease. Organizations are moving compute workloads and data storage to the cloud and virtualizing their networks and security systems. Enterprises often end up with multiple cloud services and legacy on-site data center infrastructure to maintain. Managing a hybrid cloud environment requires specialized tools, yet many enterprises have not invested in tools to manage their on-premise systems. Efficiencies can only be gained by using utilities that help with automation and orchestration in a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud/on-premise IT infrastructure. There are several flavors of Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs) available that help ease the burden of managing a varied IT landscape. Which one is right for your organization is often based on the nature of your company and the skills that your IT staff already possess. Increasing IT Staff Efficiency and Productivity IT analyst firms have estimated that enterprise IT staff spend about 75% of their time working on operations and maintenance of existing systems. The vast majority of staff time is spent supporting the physical on-premise hardware and software systems that an enterprise has invested in. These keep-the-lights-on activities consume most of the IT teams and leave little time for any new projects that actually help the business stay competitive and innovate from status quo. Enterprise organizations are always striving to keep their capital and operating expenses to a minimum and trying to get more done with less staff. This aggressive cost-cutting approach contributes to this IT dilemma whereby most IT staff are still doing many tasks manually. IT staff is continually required to maintain more devices, servers, terabytes of storage, and so on without any means of gaining greater efficiency or visibility into the infrastructure. Following is a list of examples in common IT disciplines of work types that are performed by hand and which ones leverage tools and repeatability. Compute Server and system administrators have progressed beyond building up each physical server by hand with the original installation media. They now use server virtualization software and tools to help instantiate new servers based on their standard images and configuration templates. However, many processes, such as OS patching, are still done manually. TCMPWP150304 Taxonomy of Cloud Management Platforms 2 of 11

Storage Storage administrators have taken advantage of advanced software from their vendors that allow them to virtualize the storage automatically and dynamically take advantage of storage tiers, backup, flash-accelerated, solid state drives, and resiliency, among other functions. However, upgrades and data migrations are often still performed directly by the administrator. Network Networking teams have not made significant forward progress on gaining scripting and automation of routine or advanced complex network changes. Many network administrators still make most of their changes manually by entering configuration commands directly onto individual network devices. Virtualizing the network is not typically embraced by enterprises. Security Most security administrators are still relying on outmoded perimeter defense systems, which don t help protect the internal applications that now are accessed by a mobile Internet-based workforce. Cloud-based security systems are in the infancy stage and few security administrators have the control they desire in this new cloud paradigm. For many business leaders this situation has caused frustration due to the lack of innovation and slowness of IT departments to support business operations, perpetuating increased shadow IT spending. Business leaders have been seeking ways to make the IT teams more efficient and are moving away from buying on-premise hardware and software systems that require maintenance. This has contributed to enterprise organizations interest in cloud-based services and further validates that their future value to the business is more about becoming a services broker to their internal customers, to expedite needs, and drive innovation and competitive advantage in their industry. Drivers for Cloud Adoption Cloud computing is a method of delivering applications and their supporting physical infrastructure as a networked service rather than a product. Cloud services offer a pool of shared physical resources and establish virtual infrastructures that are logically separated thus providing utility computing. The five appealing essential characteristics of cloud systems, as defined in NIST SP 800-145, are: 1. On-demand self-service 2. Broad network access 3. Resource pooling 4. Rapid elasticity 5. Measured service Along these lines, enterprise organizations wanting to gain more value for their capital and operating IT expenses are moving to the cloud. Enterprises wishing to own and operate fewer IT assets want to take advantage of cloud service benefits, which include: Rapidly elastic scalability (cloud-bursting, performance on-demand) Speed of deployment (agility, flexibility, reduced time-to-market, automatic updates) Higher availability (increased reliability) and performance TCMPWP150304 Taxonomy of Cloud Management Platforms 3 of 11

Cost savings (measured service, reduced on-premise hardware/software, moving Capex to Opex costs) Geographic reach (location independence) More enterprises are now using cloud solutions with the vast majority of companies testing and using public cloud services (typically Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)). Still more organizations are looking toward hybrid cloud as their preferential approach, and those companies concerned with the security implications of cloud and Internetaccessible systems are leaning toward private cloud infrastructures. Regardless of an enterprise s risk profile, the vast majority of companies are using cloud for development and test environments, followed by customer-facing web applications, internal-company web applications, mobile/social applications, and marketing applications. Larger enterprises may feel more confident utilizing cloud infrastructure services from one of the big cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, or Google Compute Engine (GCE). Enterprises may also want to create a more customized or private cloud system by leveraging cloud services offered by telcos/isps/it manufacturers such as: Verizon/Terremark, Hewlett Packard (HP), IBM (SoftLayer), AT&T, CenturyLink, Joyent, VMware, and many more. Each cloud provider has their own particular nuances and characteristics and many organizations find themselves in analysis paralysis from having too many options to consider and in the end fail to make any decisions. The Resulting Multi-Cloud Environment The fact is that no single cloud provider will be able to provide everything that a large enterprise requires. Enterprises have different types of applications, compute workloads, storage and backup needs that may necessitate using a variety of cloud services for their assortment of individual applications. Organizations may also try to leverage the cloud providers that are giving them the best financial deal and moving workloads between cloud providers as usage-based prices fall. Eventually, many enterprises end up in a situation where they are using multiple cloud solutions. Organizations may have several of their applications hosted by a SaaS provider, they may also be using an IaaS provider for certain public-facing applications and testing, and the enterprise may still have a private cloud infrastructure. It is easy to see how multi-cloud environments are going to be increasingly common in the coming years as IT leaders strive to be the IT service brokers for their organizations and try to minimize the keep the lights on workload. If enterprise organizations were to apply their legacy methods of manually performing IT tasks with these new cloud services, they would not be realizing the true benefits of cloud services. Each cloud provider and environment has their own dashboard, native interface, console, CLI, and proprietary APIs for managing their cloud resources. These customer-facing consoles facilitate provisioning new servers, storage and networking on a self-provisioning, advanced/reserved-provisioning, or a dynamic provisioning basis. If an enterprise solely interacts with their cloud services through these web dashboards, then they are not gaining efficiency and increased productivity. Organizations can only realize the scalability, rapid provisioning, and elasticity if they use the vendor s Application Programming Interfaces (API) and leverage software utilities to aid in managing the cloud resources. TCMPWP150304 Taxonomy of Cloud Management Platforms 4 of 11

If an enterprise organization has moved some applications to the cloud and yet are still maintaining many internal applications, then it s possible that instead of increasing efficiency they may have created a more difficult administrative situation. Many organizations are now managing one or more cloud infrastructures in addition to the legacy on-site systems. If these companies have not invested in ways to automate many of these tasks, they have only added to the workload of the IT staff. These companies would then be striving to secure internal applications that are exposed to an internal and Internet-mobile workforce in addition to securing data used by cloud applications. Serious trouble may occur if they are still trying to do all these tasks by hand. Cloud Management Platforms Given that most enterprises will end up managing one, and typically more than one, cloud provider, then it behooves them to try to wring as much efficiency out of the system as possible. If an organization wants to move beyond the cloud providers web-based consoles and dashboards and strive for greater levels of automation, then they either need to create their own scripts based on the vendor s Command Line Interface (CLI) and APIs and Representational State Transfer (RESTful) interfaces, or search for a Common Off-the-Shelf (COTS) software package that helps facilitate cloud management. Organizations who are looking for a system to give them control and automated configuration over their cloud services will easily discover a myriad of Cloud Management Platform (CMP) offerings. The Cloud Management Platforms are software, or cloud services themselves, that facilitate the configuration of an organizations public, private, or hybrid cloud infrastructure. These integrated cloud management tools can be a central interface for IT administrators coordinating creation of new applications, maintaining existing services, or scaling up or down their cloud workloads. The CMPs can also provide an interface for enterprise users or lines-of-business (LoBs) to selfprovision their own IT resources. Following is a list of the features and benefits that many of these CMPs provide. Creating a consistent abstraction layer between the public/private/hybrid cloud resources (Cloud Computing Resources (CCRs)) and IT administrators Ability to create policy that helps with consistency/repeatability, scalability, redundancy/high-availability/backup/dr, and service lifecycle automation Facilitates security of cloud systems and helps manage risk, provide version control Provide Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), restricted admin access, and user access control to self-service portals Monitoring of configuration of cloud services, monitoring performance (page load times, application response time, uptime, etc.), monitoring capacity (capacity planning) Maintain quality control of configurations and templates, resulting in fewer human errors Workflow mapping and approval of cloud resource deployments, approval, scheduling, limits on resource allocations, runbook, process automation, change management TCMPWP150304 Taxonomy of Cloud Management Platforms 5 of 11

Improve speed and business agility, improve service delivery times, Quality of Service (QoS), increased administrator efficiency (reduce cost of IT operations), auto-scaling, elastic workload infrastructure resource pooling and sharing Consistency of repetitive tasks, making all configurations identical, less complexity (supports compliance and policy configurations), configuration management Financial control over what cloud services are consumed, enterprise cloud governance, flexible costs between multiple providers, resource allocation/limits, tracking, billing and department-level chargebacks/showbacks, metering of services Single pane-of-glass for IT administrators, easy to use, speeds up manual configurations One system for managing heterogeneous environments, cloud/platform neutrality, migration of workloads between clouds, manage pools of compute resources across heterogeneous clouds Creation of a self-service IT portal for the business to utilize making IT more business friendly, service catalog, reduce shadow-it spending, whitelabel customized enterprise cloud console, enterprise-application store and marketplace integration, IT vending machine Allow movement of services between cloud vendors, cloud portability, integration and pooling of resources from multiple cloud services, OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) support Proactive and reactive troubleshooting, event management, problem management, diagnostics of service affecting situations, root cause analysis, service visibility, availability tracking/monitoring/alerting, SLA monitoring It is unlikely that an enterprise will get everything on this list in a single CMP product because each vendor has their own unique capabilities, features and specializations. Instead, it is more likely they will need to buy more than one product to receive all their desired capabilities. Realistically, organizations would invest in a tool that covers their most important features and then augment those features with home-grown utilities or other open source products. Types and Styles of CMPs It is estimated that there are over fifty different CMP software packages available on the market. They range in capability and they vary in their applicability, depending on the specific cloud environments they are helping an organization maintain. They also span from open source software with a GNU General Public License (GPL), or similar license, all the way up to expensive enterprise-grade software suitable for the largest organizations who are managing a multitude of cloud resources. There is also a consolidation of CMP vendors whereby larger IT companies are acquiring CMP companies to add to their cloud-based product portfolios. Following is a table of the different types and styles of CMPs and the products that fall into these categories. TCMPWP150304 Taxonomy of Cloud Management Platforms 6 of 11

Cloud Management Platform Type Cloud-vendor management systems Commercially-available enterprise-grade CMPs and multicloud CMP point solutions, packaged cloud management focused software solutions Cloud management platforms from traditional IT infrastructure equipment and hardware manufacturers, infrastructure-vendor-specific management platforms Vendor, Company, Product Name AWS, Azure, GCE, cloud provider dashboard portal, console, CLI, APIs BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, RightScale, Egenera PAN Cloud Director, CA Technologies AppLogic (formerly 3Tera), CSC ServiceMesh, Abiquo anycloud, Cognizant Cloud360, InContinuum Cloud Controller, CliQr CloudCenter Cisco Systems Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (CIAC), Cisco UCS Director (formerly Cloupia), Cisco InterCloud Director VMware vsphere with Operations Management, VMware vcloud Automation Center (vcac) (formerly DynamicOps), vcenter Operations Management Suite (vcoms), vcloud Director IBM SmartCloud Microsoft System Center 2012 (SCCM/SCOM) Dell Cloud Manager (formerly Enstratius), Dell Active System Manager (formerly Gale) Hewlett-Packard (HP) Cloud Service-Automation (CSA), HP CloudSystem Foundation and Enterprise Open source cloud platform management OpenStack, CloudStack, OpenNebula, Eucalyptus, Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible, among others Note: This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all the vendors.this list is intended to highlight the major categories of CMP products. Any failure to list a specific vendor s product is due to the limited space of this paper. Comparing and Contrasting the CMP Types The four major categories of CMPs shown in the table above all have their target deployment scenario. Not every product can be all things for all customers. Instead, each product has specific cloud characteristics that are in some cases an advantage and in other situations might be a disadvantage to a specific customer deployment scenario. While the portals, dashboards and consoles from the cloud providers do a good job of helping manage that particular cloud provider s resources, they are proprietary and cannot be used on another cloud infrastructure. Often-times, these cloud-provider tools don t support creating an IT self-service portal. There are numerous commercially available CMPs available and many of these are capable of managing a multi-cloud environment. These solutions vary based on the cloud providers they support, their ability to migrate workloads across those multiple clouds, and the types of interfaces they offer the IT administrator. There are so many of these COTS CMP solutions that it would require appropriate due diligence for an enterprise to select the best fit. TCMPWP150304 Taxonomy of Cloud Management Platforms 7 of 11

There are a variety of management platforms available for purchase from those same companies who have historically made money selling enterprises on-premise noncloud-based systems. Companies like Cisco, EMC/VMware, Microsoft, Dell, HP, IBM, and others now all offer solutions that can help manage cloud infrastructures. As one might expect, some of these are heavily biased to that same manufacturer s products and to the cloud providers that use those manufacturer s hardware and software. Also, these CMP solutions typically only offer IaaS cloud service functionality because these vendor s products are the foundational infrastructure components of a cloud. There is also a substantial selection of open source cloud management software packages and platforms available. Some of these have been under development longer than many of the commercial offerings, but they do require an enterprise to support themselves. Enterprise IT management should be reminded that a no-initial-cost open source license does not mean a no-cost solution. An enterprise must have people on staff who can do-it-yourself and maintain these platforms for many years. An enterprise will incur costs in the amount of administration time and the high-level of skill required to get these platforms up and running, keep them patched, and continue to develop them and hopefully contribute code back to the open source community from whence they came. Which CMP is Right for You? When an enterprise starts to explore the topic of CMPs, they will start to create a list of their requirements and match them to the table shown above. The enterprise will then consider the advantages and disadvantages of these various styles of cloud management systems and start to determine which type is right for their organization. The choice of CMP is similar to any other IT purchase in that the decision is based on the type of organization you have or the characteristics of your organization. Choices like this often come down to what technologies and systems your IT staff is already comfortable with. The costs to train people on a completely new system can be costly and introduces human error which may outweigh any cost savings derived from switching platforms. In prior years, the manufacturer of your hypervisor affected your CMP decision. However, now most all CMP vendors support VSphere/ESX, Hyper-V, KVM, and XenServer. Therefore, this is becoming less and less of a product choice consideration, although the fact remains that VMware vsphere has the broadest support among all CMP products. Because most organizations still manage considerable amounts of on-site corporate data center bare-metal or virtualized servers, most enterprises will want a CMP that manages both cloud and physical hardware. Most organizations, if not already using multiple clouds, will eventually end up striving to manage a multiple cloud deployment. Therefore, selecting a CMP product that supports multiple cloud services is an essential feature even if the enterprise only uses a single cloud provider today. If an enterprise needs a solution that allows for migration of data between SaaS cloud systems, then a traditional CMP would not be ideally suited for this function. Instead, an enterprise would want to explore investing in a cloud-based integration software solution, otherwise known as an Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS). These IPaaS platforms facilitate sharing data and processes between SaaS applications. Some of TCMPWP150304 Taxonomy of Cloud Management Platforms 8 of 11

the companies who offer solutions like this are: MuleSoft, Dell Boomi AtomSphere, Informatica Cloud Services, Actian, IBM WebSphere Cast Iron Live, SAP, SnapLogic Elastic Integration, in addition to many others. Enterprises should prefer a vendor s products that have well documented and standardized APIs. Some enterprises strive to avoid vendor lock-in whenever possible but the proprietary nature of some vendor s solutions are unavoidable. It is easy to see how an organizations current installed base of hardware, software, and virtualization software drive that organization to choose a CMP from the same vendor that makes their current physical infrastructure. Open source systems may be more like a science project and less like a ready-to-use product. Some of these open source systems like OpenStack may require significant time investment in getting their distributed components integrated. Although, now there are companies that an enterprise can leverage to help with the support of open source software making it more of a product with a supportable software maintenance contract. Following is a table that lists several characteristics or needs of an organization and then prescribes which CMP may be the most appropriate to consider. Characteristics of Your Organization Built your own private cloud using predominantly Cisco hardware (UCS, Nexus, etc.), using FlexPod, VSPEX, or Cisco InterCloud Best-Fit CMP Solution Cisco UCS Director (formerly Cloupia), Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (CIAC) You are using VCE Vblock in your current data centers CMPs that use the VCE Vision API such as VMware vcops, BMC, Cisco UCS Director Using only AWS and do not have a multi-cloud deployment Stick with AWS s consoles and APIs, but don t expect to move workloads easily between cloud providers. BMC, RightScale, Nimbula Making extensive use of VMware vsphere/esx hypervisor and VMware vcloud Hybrid Service (vchs) (now vcloud Air) VMware vcloud Automation Center (vcac), vcloud Director, vcenter Operations Management Suite (vcops) Using AWS but still want an open source CMP solution Eucalyptus, Citrix CloudPlatform, Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager Already using Linux servers, have IT staff that is adept at complex Linux configurations Open Source solutions like OpenStack, CloudStack, OpenNebula, Scalr, Puppet, Chef, Ansible Desire to use OpenStack but augment with other cloud management features Cisco UCS Director, CIAC, Virtustream, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Citrix CloudPlatform, VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIOS), HP CSF, IBM SmartCloud Have mostly Windows Servers, possibly Hyper-V and leveraging Azure cloud services Microsoft System Center, RightScale, Cloudkick, IBM SmartCloud, Cisco UCS Director, CIAC, HP CSE, Dell Active System Manager (ASM) Using CSC s cloud services CSC ServiceMesh TCMPWP150304 Taxonomy of Cloud Management Platforms 9 of 11

Characteristics of Your Organization Using Terremark Enterprise Cloud services Best-Fit CMP Solution ScaleXtreme (now Citrix) Desire an open source solution for your private cloud Eucalyptus, OpenStack, CloudStack, Citrix CloudPortal/ CloudPlatform, Scalr Need a solution that allows migration of workloads between cloud providers RiverMeadow, RightScale, CA, IBM SmartCloud, CliQr CloudCenter, among others Have invested in Citrix NetScaler ADC products and use either VMware or XenServer hypervisors Citrix CloudPlatform, CloudPortal Business Manager Using other HP software products such as HP Operations Orchestration (OO), Server Automation (SA) HP Cloud System Enterprise (CSE) Using IBM s hardware and middleware IBM PureFlex System Manager, IBM SmartCloud, IBM PureApplication System Summary Using a CMP is an inevitability for most large organizations. Most enterprises will use some form of cloud service and more than likely these companies will end up with multiple clouds to manage in addition to traditional on-site compute, storage and networking hardware and software. A CMP would allow an enterprise to recognize the benefits of using cloud solutions such as: deployment agility, rapid elastic scalability, reliability/availability, performance, and measured service and potential reduced costs. A CMP would allow IT administrators to leverage these cloud characteristics more readily than they could if they were only interfacing with the cloud vendor s console/ dashboard/portal. A CMP would be a more sustainable solution for an enterprise and help them avoid having to write much of their own custom software to the cloud vendors proprietary APIs. There is a myriad of CMP products on the market and a whole host of open source cloud automation and orchestration software platforms to choose from. Cloud management tools fall into four basic categories: cloud vendor tools, purpose-build CMPs, cloud tools from traditional data center infrastructure vendors, and open source systems. The choice of a CMP is somewhat based on the skills and capabilities of the current IT administrators, and the data center, cloud infrastructure and software systems they are familiar with. Other criteria for selecting a CMP may include which hypervisor, cloud provider, or advanced functionality is required. However, in some specific cases it may make sense to go against the legacy infrastructure in an enterprise and chart a new course toward cloud services. Regardless, enterprises should make an informed choice to achieve multi-cloud deployment operational excellence. TCMPWP150304 Taxonomy of Cloud Management Platforms 10 of 11

About GTRI GTRI provides industry-leading consulting and technology services that help clients derive real business value from their technology investments. With deep foundations in both networking and data center technologies, we support clients across a broad spectrum of industries with IT strategy, planning, private and cloud architectures, implementation and IT operations. Learn more at www.gtri.com. 1.877.603.1984 sales@gtri.com www.gtri.com CERTIFIED TCMPWP150304 2015 Global Technology Resources, Inc. All rights reserved. Taxonomy of Cloud Management Platforms 11 of 11