The enStratus Blog

enStratus, CloudStack, and the Apache Foundation

Several years ago, enStratus became the first cloud management platform to support the cloud platform of a company then known as VMOps. Since then, we’ve implemented public and private cloud solutions against VMOps, Cloud.com, and Citrix CloudStack for small companies, service providers, and enterprise private clouds. Today, we are thrilled to be part of the next step in the evolution of the CloudStack cloud platform as it becomes an incubator project for the Apache Foundation.

Obviously, enStratus will continue to support clouds built on CloudStack. enStratus brings to CloudStack everything you expect from enStratus in other cloud environments, including governance, budget management and chargebacks, automation, and more. In addition, enStratus orchestrates multi-cloud operations that include CloudStack among other options like Amazon’s public cloud. You can even use enStratus to automate the deployment of PaaS solutions like CloudFoundry on top of CloudStack.

But enStratus also has a long history of supporting Open Source efforts in the cloud space. In 2010, we released our cloud abstraction layer, Dasein Cloud, as an Open Source project under the Apache 2.0 license. enStratus customers as well as developers with no relationship to enStratus use Dasein Cloud to provide “write once, run against any cloud” capabilities for Java-based cloud applications. Our support of Open Source in the cloud space extends to many other projects beyond Dasein Cloud. We already have a number of things in mind that we would like to see in cloud platforms, and we look forward to working with the CloudStack Apache incubator project to bring these things to fruition.

Extend LDAP/AD Into Your Cloud Management

Whether you have a public, private, or hybrid cloud, a best-practice includes extending your LDAP or Active Directory (AD) into your cloud management security. This allows you to build on your existing security policies and improve the efficiencies of your cloud infrastructure user management.

1. Delegated Authority: This enables you to set up users in enStratus without the need to set up users and passwords. Here are a couple common tasks that would benefit from directory services integration.

• Add a user to LDAP - enStratus will discover the user and add that user an all group memberships for that user to enStratus.

• Terminate user from LDAP - enStratus will deactivate the user in the enStratus directory as well as remove any Windows and Unix accounts for that user on VMs in the cloud.

2. Automated Management: Remotely manage users and group membership

3. Access Controls: Granular, role-based permissioning managed within enStratus across one or more clouds

Leverage Directory Services to extend security and access controls into private and public clouds

These capabilities will save you time and keep your security policies consistent across clouds.

If you would like to learn more, you can request a copy of our User Management for Private and Public Clouds document.

Cloud OS or Cloud Management Software?

As with any emerging market comes terminology confusion.  The term “Cloud Management” is a great recent example. We want to take a few minutes to help define this important term.

You will hear people refer to various solutions as Cloud Management Software – from Cloud Operating Systems to tools that allow you to manage multiple SaaS solutions.

In the IaaS space, Cloud Management Software sits on top of various public and private clouds and provides the following capabilities:

1)   Allows users to provision, manage and control various public clouds and private cloud platforms

2)   Helps manage users, security, and automation across infrastructures

3)   Protect from single cloud vendor lock-in to allow cross-cloud operations and migration

4)   Manage your service level requirements

5)   Audit and report for compliance

The diagram below shows our perspective of the relationship Cloud OS solutions.

 

VMware has a great definition of a Cloud OS.

“A cloud operating system is a new category of software that is specifically designed to holistically manage large collections of infrastructure – CPUs, storage, networking – as a seamless, flexible and dynamic operating environment.  Analogous to the operating system that manages the complexity of an individual machine, the cloud operating system manages the complexity of a datacenter.”

We hope that this helps clarify the difference.

 

Cross-Cloud Management Today

Over the past few months, more and more organizations have moved toward leveraging multiple cloud providers.  Whether it’s a private/public hybrid model or multiple public providers, this is definitely a trend.

Our vision has always been that organizations will use multiple cloud providers and need one management, governance and automation solution for all of them. 

Security, Provisioning and Financial Controls

Many of our customers have been starting VMs in multiple cloud providers like AWS, Rackspace, Eucalyptus and Cloud.com.  With our granular access controls, enStratus provides you the ability to grant access to each person or group with the access they require for the appropriate clouds.

In addition our financial controls allow you to track spending across clouds including soft and hard spending caps across all the clouds you manage with enStratus.

Cross-cloud dependencies, cloud-bursting, cross-cloud DR, and cross-cloud auto-scaling

Though managing multiple independent clouds from inside enStratus is cool, enStratus also enables you to create managed applications that operate across multiple clouds. For example, you can configure an application to operate entirely within your private data center up to a certain capacity threshold and have enStratus burst part, or all of it, into a public cloud beyond that capacity. The image below shows an example of how to set the bursting to the secondary cloud after 5 servers.

For truly distributed application architectures, enStratus has the capability to automate cross-cloud auto-scaling. enStratus will make sure traffic for your distributed application is balanced evenly across multiple clouds and provide you redundancy even in the face of the complete failure of one of your cloud providers. Even if you don’t want the redundancy, enStratus will optionally backup to a DR cloud.

  

Manage Your Private/Hybrid Clouds from Your Own Data Center

Most companies got their first exposure to cloud computing through public cloud options such as any of the many public clouds supported by enStratus.  When operating a public cloud, it makes a lot of sense to leverage a SaaS tool like the enStratus SaaS solution. You simply visit https://cloud.enstratus.com/page/1/register.jsp, sign up, and immediately begin using enStratus to manage your cloud. No software installation needed.

Running a private cloud? Leverage enStratus on-premise!

Most enterprises these days are looking beyond the public cloud to hybrid and private cloud computing. While our SaaS solution is perfectly capable of managing private and hybrid clouds, we think it makes sense to have an on-premise management tool when managing on-premise clouds. The systems you are deploying in a private cloud are obviously important enough to keep within your data center, so it makes no sense to allow a third-party control that infrastructure from beyond your firewalls.

Same Features, On-premise. The enStratus on-premise solution provides the same exact features as our SaaS offerings, operating in your data center instead of ours. It’s a simple installation and you can plug it into your SSO infrastructure (including SAML 2.0 and OpenID). You can then point enStratus at your private and public clouds.

enStratus is simply the only enterprise cloud infrastructure capable of on-premise deployment for managing public and private clouds.

Most Cloud Platforms, including VMware vCloud. No other cloud management offering provides the same freedom of choice among a cloud platforms and public clouds as enStratus. We natively support vCloud, Nimbula, OpenStack, Eucalyptus, and Cloud.com. In addition, you can leverage all of the public compute clouds we support (AWS, Bluelock, CloudSigma, GoGrid, Rackspace, Terremark) and all of the public storage clouds (AWS, AT&T, Azure, Google, Rackspace) from within your data center.

Operate across clouds: Cross-cloud dependencies, cloud-bursting, cross-cloud DR, and cross-cloud auto-scaling

Though managing multiple independent clouds from inside enStratus is cool, enStratus also enables you to create managed applications that operate across multiple clouds. For example, you can configure an application to operate entirely within your private data center up to a certain capacity threshold and have enStratus burst part or all of it into a public cloud beyond that capacity.

For truly distributed application architectures, enStratus has the capability to automate cross-cloud auto-scaling. enStratus will make sure traffic for your distributed application is balanced evenly across multiple clouds and provide you redundancy even in the face of the complete failure of one of your cloud providers. Even if you don’t want the redundancy, enStratus will optionally backup to a DR cloud.