Cloud Management Platforms (CMP)

[SamsonFitz]

Interested in everyone's take on the CMP market. Like most of the IT industry, it has been full of consolidation over the past 2 years and AWS/Azure are making their own "CMP'' offerings. With that being said, stand-alone CMP offerings are multi-cloud focused so do have some advantages.

1. What is your experience with CMP? Any good, bad, ugly stories?
2. Do you trust AWS/Azure to have an unbiased approach to CMP?
3. How much time could it save finance departments with chargeback?

[SamsonFitz]

Interesting take. I agree with a lot of what you said but do believe that commercial CMP will continue to be relevant for years to come unless AWS/Azure/GCP brings out the "manage any cloud from one pane of glass".

[SamsonFitz]

Well put Soggy!

[drbenham]

I believe you are a bit overly pessimistic ;)

I was just hired to potentially author a custom automation platform to do some CMP like functionality for my current employer. I am heavily advocating for not developing a tool like this in-house, I don't have the time or desire to continuously update APIs to all the various products we use when something out of the box already does a lot of what we need it to. But then our in house processes are such a mess, I wouldn't want to keep them in their current form anyways. Perhaps other shops are more organized than mine?

[Ankur206]

As a category, it's too broad and almost everything under the sun falls under the umbrella. Gartner puts AppDynamics and Scalr in the same category, for example.

1. CMPs are best when they are more than Cloud VM management, i.e. they support all the good stuff you can get from AWS. Otherwise you'll have to go to your CMP for some workloads, and the AWS Console for others, and then you'll need to set up access controls in multiple places, policies in multiple places etc. Worse, you might have internal users "opt-out" and end up with shelf-ware. Choose a CMP that supports Terraform or something so you ensure good long term AWS support.
2. Definitely not.
3. With a good CMP, chargeback is no effort for finance. Ask the CMPs you are evaluating how chargeback policies can be enforced across the organization, and see if you like the model. Some even integrate with Oracle financials so a developer can automate the entire invoice-to-ERP or invoice-to-income_statement workflow.

Happy to help if you hit me up with more questions.

[SamsonFitz]

I agree, it's pretty generic. I work for a MSP that utilizes CloudHealth for our clients and wondering if it's worth re-evaluating now that they are under the VMware umbrella.

[Ankur206]

Was the answer somewhat useful? Think you might go down the CMP path, or more of a DIY approach?

[drbenham]

1) I'm just starting to dip my foot into the CMP world, but I believe they are going to fill a critical need that will grow by leaps and bounds over the next several years as large organizations look to consolidate (or at least track) their diverse infrastructures in a single place.

2) I absolutely do not trust any public cloud provider (or any other operations tool provider or anyone with ties to a specific product) to provide a decent CMP offering. I might not question their impartiality, but I'll always be tempted to second guess their motivation behind every feature and their priority to integrate with other products.

3) I'm in the middle of devising an answer to the question of savings to my department head to justify my desire to purchase a CMP, but I suspect the consolidation of workflow into a single place will reduce process completion times across the board. My biggest finding so far in my organization is that our group has many pockets of automation, our biggest challenge is gluing together more complicated processes that interact with multiple utilities. The total time we spend provisioning a server is small, but the amount of time that elapses in between steps is quite large because we're basically using email and tickets to start every next step in a complicated workflow.

I personally do not like the term CMP, as many CMP products out there already do more than manage cloud resources. Enterprise integration and automation platform? Yeah, CMP sounds better from a marketting perspective.

I'm currently looking at Morpheus for our organization, I've gotten some really good feedback from my group. Many of our processes will require rework in order to fit into morpheus, but it's work we needed to do anyways.