How We Created Cloudify as a Service for VMWare

Cloudify as a Service for vCloud Air

Cloudify is the only open source orchestration platform that delivers native support for the VMware stack, includingvSphere, vCloud (vCA, vCD) and VMware Integrated OpenStack.

This week marks an important milestone as we introduced the vCloud® Air™ Blueprinting Service developed  jointly by VMware and Cloudify. This new service gives vCloud Air users the ability to utilize Cloudify’s open source orchestration platform to simplify deployment automation and lifecycle management of their apps on VMware’s Public Cloud.

This achievement demonstrates how a public cloud provider can embed Cloudify as an integrated orchestration service, including the ability to provide a custom user interface for both the web interface and command line interface, as well as an authentication service and turn it into a native extension to its existing cloud service.  While the service is built on Cloudify, we were able to extend it to expose some of the vCloud specific services, such as the networking (NSX) and Database services, demonstrating that Cloudify doesn’t force a least common denominator. What’s more, because the Blueprinting Service is built directly into vCloud Air as an embedded service, it does not require any setup or installation by end users.

Read how we created the scalable blueprinting service using Cloudify.

What is the difference between Cloudify and other cloud orchestrators?

Cloudify is an open source, TOSCA-based orchestration platform. That means no vendor lock-in with the ability to automate deployments on multiple cloud infrastructures. Moreover, the fact that its the only open source orchestration that integrates natively with the entire VMware stack allows users to customize their DevOps environment any way they like on their VMware environment.

Extend to your private cloud

Users can download Cloudify into their own environment and use the same orchestration blueprint template to automate their applications on their private vCloud, vSphere or VIO environment. Similarly vCA users can also use Cloudify-vCloud plug-in to create their own custom blueprinting service and take advantage of additional monitoring, logging, auto-scaling, and self-healing features under their vCA environment.

A summary of the key features is provided below:

Key features

• Available as an embedded service with vCloud Air,free for vCloud Air users
• Zero footprint - the service doesn’t install an agent or other resources on the application environment and doesn’t require any software download and setup
• No lock-in: pure-play orchestration with open-source, standard-based (TOSCA) model
• Supports vCloud Air services, such as networking and database as a service
• Extensible through a simple script-based plugin 
• Includes built-in service discovery to handle service chaining and dependency injection
• Full application life-cycle management 
• Designed for web-scale
• Extend the Blueprinting Service with Cloudify Premium to create your own custom blueprinting service on vCloud Air or bring your vCA environment into the private cloud and add extended workflow, monitoring, and auto-scaling capabilities.

Demo

Below is a demo that shows how to create and deploy an application using the TOSCA blueprint on vCloud Air.

vRealize and Cloudify

The vRealize Suite is a cloud management platform that provides a comprehensive management stack for managing the entire VMware product portfolio. Paired with Cloudify, vRealize users can not only manage their VMware assets, but they also can manage popular DevOps tools such as Kubernetes/Docker for containers, Chef, SaltStack and Puppet for configuration management, and tools like ElasticSearch, Logstash, influxdb, Grafan for logging and monitoring as well as a and Fabric. In addition, Cloudify can use the information from vRA-OPS to correlate the state of the application with the state of the infrastructure to optimize resource utilization and ensure that the application meets its desired SLA.

Wait… There’s More!

Cloudify is not just an integrated service. Our Premium Edition offers the ability to extend your vCloud environment into a private vCloud, vSphere, or VIO  environment as well. To learn more about that, see our Premium page.

And stay tuned the rest of the week as we expand more on our adventure of building Cloudify into an Orchestration-as-a-Service.