{"id":536,"date":"2014-01-23T20:29:02","date_gmt":"2014-01-23T09:29:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.coffeescroll.com\/?p=536"},"modified":"2014-01-29T06:28:33","modified_gmt":"2014-01-28T19:28:33","slug":"what-is-a-cloud-management-platform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.coffeescroll.com\/index.php\/what-is-a-cloud-management-platform\/","title":{"rendered":"What is a Cloud Management platform?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Cloud keeps diversifying. New offerings come on the market each month. IaaS vendors innovate and create new services to help their customers (and if it also locks them in that’s okay too).<\/p>\n

That said there is a core set of capabilities everyone looks for in an IaaS cloud. You may want to build an Ubuntu image with a particular number of vCPUs and memory. You don’t really want to concern yourself with the cloud server types that a vendor like Rackspace or AWS provides.<\/p>\n

You don’t want to specialise in understanding the API of every cloud vendor when configuring your continuous deployment tools either.<\/p>\n

You just want a server, operating system and some software that you can move between clouds. You’d love it if cloud providers agreed on some standards. If only.<\/p>\n

Cloud management platforms – like RightScale<\/a> (Ed: corrected<\/em>) or Scalr<\/a> -manage this disconnect.<\/p>\n

Most cloud management solutions are aligning their security models, virtual networking and API strategy with AWS. They aim to provide their customers with the ability to migrate workloads between owned and non-owned clouds. They are both open source and proprietary.<\/p>\n

Cloud management platforms represent both an immediate necessity for managing complexity and also an opportunity to start building sophisticated IT operations management platforms that allow better planning for the IT function, an ERP for IT if you like.<\/p>\n

The following diagram shows where Cloud Management platforms reside in the Cloud stack (as distinct from Cloud platforms).<\/p>\n

\"Cloud<\/a>
\nIt\u2019s important to understand the difference between a Cloud Management platform<\/em> (managing lack of standards between clouds) and a Cloud platform<\/em> (turning your hypervisor and other shared resources into a private cloud)<\/p>\n

For your cloud management platform<\/em> to perform its function of integrating with your private cloud it needs to integrate with your internal cloud platform<\/em>. Most organisations have created their private cloud by taking their existing investment in virtualisation and adding a cloud platform tier.<\/p>\n

The expected features of a Cloud Management platform are:<\/p>\n