Hybrid Cloud Management Use Case:
A large scale organization attempted to digitally transform its approach to delivering information technology capabilities. The organization needed to rapidly provision and deprovision its resources to meet elastic demand, allowing consumers a self-service option while limiting consumption to only approved environments.
There was a need to incorporate both on-premise and commercial cloud resources, managing those resources from a single pane of glass. OpenStack was an obvious choice for on-premise cloud deployments, but implementation can be challenging. Additionally, upgrading and managing OpenStack itself can be an overwhelming burden, even for large IT departments. Cisco Metapod deployment was the shortest path to deployment, with the least amount of overhead burden to an already overtasked engineering team.
However, this was only one part of a complex set of issues. The client was also seeking to reduce costs around development and testing by accessing commercial cloud assets. Additionally, there was a need for a code promotion strategy, migrating workloads from one environment to the next, along with role-based access controls to ensure that only approved personnel could use certain resources.
The requirements are summarized as this:
- Rapidly provision and deprovision infrastructure
- Allow for approved templates to be reused consistently regardless of provisioned infrastructure
- Governance for:
- Middleware
- Connections to Data Sources
- System patches
- Resource consumption
- Customer and Business Units
- Showback
- Chargeback
- Self-service
In order to achieve all of the necessary requirements, we elected to integrate CloudForms to provide the universal configuration controls, along with connections to the public cloud like Microsoft Azure, on-premise Metapod and to a ServiceNow catalogue.
Why Cisco Metapod?
This hardware system provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities on-premise, by providing reliable and programmable infrastructure. It is a simple delivery mechanism for rapidly deploying OpenStack into an enterprise.
Cisco Metapod gives you comprehensive cloud capabilities, including:
- Freedom of Location
- Your own data center
- Co-location facility
- Create multiple availability zones
- Security
- Secure audit trail logging
- SSL/TLS encryption on API endpoints
- Restricted end-user access via the dashboard and APIs
- Restricted Cisco support access via a secure administrative gateway
- Enhanced OpenStack
- Resize computing instance and auto instance failover
- Networking
- Auto network range expansion
- Cisco Metapod gateway
- Dynamic VLAN allocations
- Control plane: Highly scalable and full high availability control plane
- Reliability
- Redundant controller
- Failure and maintenance resiliency
- Upgrades without interruption to cloud services
- Operational Support
- 24×7 operational support to keep your cloud running
- Change control structure
- System health monitoring
- Self-service Capabilities
- Administrators can quickly
- Create new projects
- Assign users
- Set quotas on cloud usage
- Administrators can quickly
Why Red Hat Cloudforms?
Managing a complex, hybrid IT environment can require multiple management tools, redundant policy implementations, and extra staff to handle the operations. Red Hat® CloudForms simplifies IT, providing unified management and operations in a hybrid environment.
Comprehensive Cloud Management with Red Hat Cloudforms enables customers to:
- Accelerate service delivery and reduce operational costs
- Self-service portal and catalog with automatic provisioning
- Workload lifecycle management, including reconfiguration and retirement
- Resource quota enforcement, cost allocation, and chargeback
- Improve operational visibility and control
- Continuous discovery, monitoring, and tracking
- Resource usage, optimization, and capacity planning
- Entity relationship planning with timelines and events
- Ensure compliance and governance
- Automated policy enforcement and remediation
- Segmented user access with approval workflows
- Configuration auditing, change tracking, and drift analysis
If you’re struggling to get your hybrid cloud under control, or are looking to get started, don’t hesitate to contact Shadow-Soft today!