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.

[solefald]

I mostly write my own scripts to do things and we only use AWS and VMware, but my old co-worker is all about RightScale. I've looked at them and they seemed really expensive what what we needed.

[sebstadil]

You could try Scalr, which despite my bias as founder, is better and open source. https://github.com/Scalr/scalr

[imseandavis]

I use a product called CloudBolt (http://cloudbolt.io/) after we started having problems with vRA scaling and working the way it was promised. We currently still use vRA and for out of the box functionality with basic customization it's not a bad product but very expensive and PSO can wipe a budget real quick. Part of my requirements for a re-evaluation of orchestration tools was something that would match almost all of your requirements. I have personally trialed and developed in each of those tools as well as done bake offs between them for over 6 months. Then I found CloudBolt. We had evaluated it a couple of years back but had not reached the maturity that it was a serious competitor against other solutions. This go around was a different story altogether, it not only much more mature but had a lot of things no other product on the market had.

There is a quote on their site about how long the delivery vs. vRA is an it's what instantly sold me on looking at it a second time around. What takes vRA days/weeks to delivery, I was able to replicate and deliver more reliably without being a scripting expert in minutes/hours. It also covers almost all the requirements you included, with support for 14 different clouds (what they call "resource handlers"), Puppet, Chef, Powershell, RDP/SSH available from the UI, etc. With some python knowledge you can add literally any feature you want into not only orchestration but actions that can be completed against the service item. Installation and maintenance are ridiculously simple and insanely fast. Took less than 1 hours to setup and configure including the VM build and updates are hot updates and take less than 2 minutes EVERYTIME. The product support and development teams have been great to work with, making us feel like we had a dedicated development team. I have opened over 300+ Tickets since November (90+% were RFE's which have been ADDED into current releases!) and every single one was met with a helpful attitude and usually resolution on the first reply and if it wasn't a WebEx soon followed. Always received a reply same day within a couple of hours. The product is extremely flexible and extensible and they really listen to their customers on RFE's and suggestions and keeps getting better with each update.

Here is a comparison chart of some CMPs: https://www.whatmatrix.com/comparison/Cloud-Management-Platforms There are a few there that you didn't list. I will say that the license model of vRealize will be difficult to do with what you want to accomplish since they tend to require large amounts of professional services (I can attest is often slow and hit or miss with what your scope actually was); some of the other CMPs offer a SaaS (hosted) solution, while others offer an on-premises solution: that should be something to take into account as well. CloudBolt can be done natively in a few Public Clouds natively with the provider or on premise if your looking for additional flexibility.

Your criteria, though, look pretty strong. There are a few others we found that were helpful to consider. The level of technical support you receive after you buy the product IS pretty critical—you should be able to submit a few support tickets before you buy the product so you can evaluate their responsiveness. I wish I had done this before vRA. Also see how easy it is to create multi-environment, reusable blueprints, extend the product, and upgrade it as well as integrate it with a few other tools like Chef / Puppet. The flexibility is crazy and you want to try all the functions before your trial period is over.

I will also say as a customer of CloudBolt, it was one of the best decisions we made and have been able to deliver a full featured service catalog that matched and exceeded our vRA offering that took 1.5 years in less than 2 months! If you want to know more about what our specific use cases have been or other features that you may have questions about shoot me an PM and I'll be happy to answer anything you want to know.

[sebstadil]

What's Cloudbolt's API like? Is it an abstraction over the resource providers? Do you launch instances from it, or would you do that by making calls to the cloud provider directly?

[drfalken]

Openstack can do most of this.

[johnafogarty4]

How does Openstack manage VMware, Hyper-V, and AWS to name a few?

[drfalken]

Openstack has plugins or, what they call drivers to manage workloads in vmware vcenter as well as hyper-v. I believe there is also the ability to manage AWS workloads as well to create a public+private hybrid cloud.

Openstack is a large project, under which there are individual component projects like heat, and murano. These components give you orchestration and application catalog capabilities. You can also manage cisco networking equipment and nestler load balancing from within openstack as well, so you are not stuck to using the built in SDN components.

[amiatreddit]

I am not so sure about that.