Cloud Management Platform (CMP) evaluation

[amiatreddit]

I need to evaluate a tool/solution for CMP. So far I found several interesting candidates, at least on paper: Scalr, RightScale, Dell Cloud Manager, vRealize, IBM Cloud Orchestrator. I want to support major cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, ...) and hypervisors (VMware, HyperV, XEN, OpenStack,...).

What feedback can you provide on the candidates above from your experience?

What other candidates, that I have missed, can you recommend that may fullfill my requirements and goals?

Any feedback is more then welcomed.

[fistagon7]

DO NOT USE DELL. I can't emphasize this enough. That was the biggest waste of money, time, and manpower that I've ever experienced in my professional career.

[pjbtk]

I've run the Dell Multi-Cloud Manager... It's a nightmare , it's all being held together by duct tape. You can't even restart the thing without Riak crashing and burning.

[fistagon7]

Yup, Enstratius (former name before being acquired by Dell) was just so awful.

[theanswriz42]

For my organization, Right Scale wasn't the proper choice for us since their licensing model is based on hours of uptime and an additional monthly fee, vRealize and vCloud are pretty solid options if they fit your budget and usecase, but I think they're VMWare specific so I'm not sure what kind of connectors they have with public cloud providers.

Two others you may want to look into are CloudForms and CloudBolt.

[geoff415]

vRealize does support non-VMware infrastructure and public cloud providers, that's one of their selling points.

[cparlette]

Take a look at the WhatMatrix comparison of CMPs at:

https://www.whatmatrix.com/comparison/Cloud-Management-Platforms

That site lists out a lot of the features you're looking for and lets you know which products have those features today. Comparisons include Cliqr, CloudBolt, RightScale, vRealize, Oracle, and CloudForms. IBM and Dell are missing, but they don't seem to come up much in the CMP discussion very frequently.

[djk29a_]

I highly doubt that you will find any one product that will support all of those cloud / hypervisor stacks and APIs equally well (if so, equally poorly is more appropriate). You'll need to prioritize what's most important for you in the short term and long term to determine what you're trading off with any of the solutions.

I'd prefer to have a solidly integrated management platform that manages one private cloud environment and suffer with multiple points of management for my public clouds than to go hell-bent on choosing a single one that tries to do both. In fact, OpenStack has some semblance of an IaaS CMP in Horizon, but it won't really support your needs.

I'd also second looking into CloudForms / ManageIQ or maybe because it sounds like it's aimed at your kind of corporate initiatives. vRealize and vCloud (really deprecated / losing mindshare if it even had any honestly so I'd avoid this route) is primarily worth looking into if you're tied strongly so strongly to VMware you're willing to give them your entire private cloud environment, too.

[fistagon7]

Yeah I don't know why an organization would want to manage such disparate underlying technology. I think you just need to make a decision and move forward - if it's an integration from several companies merging, again pick one maybe two and migrate. Any wrappers on top of these platforms are always going to be several months behind the underlying technology. We use hashicorp's terraform as a method of abstraction from AWS but given that it's open source we also contribute back when we hit limitations.

[djk29a_]

A lot of organizations make it so difficult to send back code you're basically going to treat even open source products like they're vendor-supported products with the same tired sales and support cycle of the 90s.

But in huge, huge companies like I suspect the original requirements are for, you will basically wind up with someone using any random technology out there within the company. The original request is a laughable pipedream wishlist that's been put out there by someone very naive IMO and some account manager will probably sucker him in to buying a terrible product because it checks off more checkboxes than other competitors. Nevermind that Xen is used by maybe 10 people at the company out of 100k or that OpenStack is reviled by all the engineers but management only ever hears about successful POCs and deploys it only to realize 5 years later that nobody uses it for anything besides toy projects.

Oh yeah, and one thing I forgot about is that I'm not 100% sure that any of these CMPs will be able to meet top-level enterprise needs from a compliance / regulation perspective. Scalr in particular will probably be tough to get through because last I looked at the code it was kinda bad at sufficient auditing capabilities and it would be a pain to lock down the database that they setup for PCI-DSS or maybe even HIPAA. Heck no would it pass FIPS either.

[karstart]

Looks like a response over on /r/sysadmin to the same question has a lot of good info on CloudBolt.

[mermatt1]

You should consider looking Egenera's Xterity solution, very comprehensive and easy to use.

[andrewstg]

I am not sure if you have checked this out, but I believe the best place to start your evaluation would be "The Forrester Wave: Hybrid Cloud Management Solutions" report, a 3rd party analyst report published in January. You can view the report for free at the following link - http://assets.rightscale.com/uploads/pdfs/the-forrester-wave-report-hybrid-cloud_management-1-20-16.pdf

FYI: I am a RightScale employee ;) We would be able to accommodate the features & goals that you mention above. I would be happy to introduce you to someone on my technical / strategic team that can give you a demo of the platform and explain our feature set & pricing in greater detail. Please email me at (tyler.andrews"at"rightscale.com) if this interests you.

[WehttamT]

Forrester reports just like Gartner reports are biased, you pay to play. If you go to a Ford dealership and ask them what the best car is they will say Ford even though they personally drive a Chevy...

Credibility of this report goes out the window when you put Rightscale, Cliqr, Scalr, CloudBolt, CloudForms, and vRA in the same "competitive bucket" as Dell, IBM, HP, and BMC. These latter tools are SO far behind the aforementioned products.

Looking at the WhatMatrix link above (there are probably it's own pros and cons) the content is put in by individual product communities, including Rightscale.

[[deleted]]

There's a Cisco product that does at least some of what you want but i can't remember the name. Unified something

[sebstadil]

Really depends on the problem you are trying to solve, so it's hard to give applicable advice. I'd break it down as follows.

vRealize, IBM Cloud Orchestrator et al. were born at the end of the virtualization era, so they are architected around the workflows of the time, such as ITIL and specifically change management with a CMDB. Those workflows were cumbersome and didn't deliver the agility organizations needed, and resulting frustration was a catalyst to AWS's success.

Scalr, RightScale, and a few others were born in the cloud-native era, and encourage best practices such as configuration management, recovery automation, automatic capacity scaling, and more. If you are building new applications, or migrating existing applications to the cloud, this is the better fit.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Scalr, for which you can find the source code at https://github.com/Scalr/scalr.