Today we are thrilled to announce the general availability of OneFuse 1.1, an integration platform purpose-built to manage the complexity of integrating IT infrastructure and accelerate automation. We define our roadmap and strategy by listening to our customers and partners, and it’s this customer-first obsession that help distinguish us from our competitors. We want to thank our customers and partners that provided feedback and input, and we’re proud to turn your feedback into improved platform features.

Before we get to the new features available with this release, I’d like to revisit the reason we created the OneFuse platform. As a technology provider to hundreds of enterprise companies, we saw that they all seem to struggle with the same roadblocks when trying to achieve end-to-end automations at scale.

• Architectural Complexity & Lifecycle Management: Integrations are by nature complex, requiring cross-domain knowledge with specialized coding and development skills to support comprehensive provisioning and de-provisioning services.
• Custom Code & Inconsistent Integrations: Traditional infrastructure automation tools rely on integration frameworks, plug-ins, extensions that require highly customized and unsupported integrations.
• Governance, Risk, & Compliance: Customized integration services introduce the risk of human error, misconfigurations, non-compliant deployments, and vulnerabilities.
• Multi-Tool & Platform Support: Organizations are rapidly adopting new deployment tools platforms, requiring I&O teams to integrate and support multiple infrastructure delivery tools.

Sound familiar? This is why we created OneFuse, to provide an integration platform with a single focus on IT operations and infrastructure. OneFuse provides codeless integrations services that easily extend across IT platforms and tools. The value of these services is driven by OneFuse’s policy and templating engines, which provide the structure for teams and SMEs to create integration services that are standardized, re-usable and compliant and eliminates the need for privileged access or specific domain expertise.

If you’re not yet a OneFuse customer – we invite you to download our 45-day free trial and see the power of the platform for yourself.

With that said, let’s check out what’s new in OneFuse 1.1. In addition to custom naming capabilities, we are now releasing the first set of endpoint modules which focus on supporting foundational technologies needed for hybrid cloud deployments. These modules provide all of the business logic you need to configure integration services that can be extended for use with vRealize Automation 7 and 8, as well as Terraform.

New with OneFuse 1.1

Microsoft Active Directory

With the Microsoft Active Directory module, organizations can flexibly drive Windows server registration with Microsoft Active Directory. Microsoft Active Directory (AD) is a crucial requirement in most Windows server deployments.

DNS

OneFuse DNS modules provide a fully automated method of controlling DNS records as the cloud environment dynamically scales, reducing the support burden and increasing the chances of successful ITaaS deployments. Modules are available for:

Infoblox DNS

BlueCat DNS

Men&Mice DNS

Microsoft DNS

IPAM Modules

OneFuse IPAM modules offers a fully automated method of obtaining and releasing IP addresses as the cloud environment dynamically scales. IP subnets can now easily be shared between deployments and alongside existing tools and devices without fear of IP conflict. Modules are available for:

Infoblox IPAM

BlueCat IPAM

Men&Mice IPAM

As development on OneFuse continues, we also recognize that our customers may not be able to wait for the general release of upcoming modules, so we are also pleased to announce XaaM, our Anything-as-a-Module service. These are customized subscription services, built with your defined business logic, delivered through the OneFuse platform to provide the same cross platform usability and governance capabilities.

We’re already hard at work on OneFuse 1.2, but we always want your feedback. CloudBolt is committed to building hybrid cloud technologies that help our customers meet your goals. Reach out with any questions.

Sign up for a Free Trial of CloudBolt OneFuse today.

It’s the convenient untruth: There is a common misconception that software that is flexible and extensible is also necessarily complex and hard to use. The thinking goes, if a product allows you to extend and customize it, it must be hard to set up and use.  

SAP is the classic example of this. Their ERP has long been the archetype of extremely powerful software that can do anything you want. However, lots of time is required from SAP professional services to get it functional within an organization.  

On the other end of the spectrum lie most consumer-facing mobile apps. They are simple to use, but generally have limited configurability or extensibility. I can’t program my own extensions for the Strava app on my phone (unfortunately). 

This misconception saves product managers, designers, and software engineers a lot of work. If they can make the case that extensibility and simplicity cannot co-exist, it makes their job much easier. 

The Resistance 

Just because most software products lie on the line in the graph above does not mean that it is impossible to create a product that is both easy to use and extensible. 

When Auggy da Rocha and I founded CloudBolt, we did so with the specific intention of building a product that was both usable out-of-the-box without any customization, but that also allowed more advanced administrators to customize the product to look and act exactly the way required for their organization. Achieving both of these simultaneously was not easy, and did not come for free, but we knew that this combination of attributes was necessary to provide a solution customers would love. 

When we in the software industry get past the misconception that simplicity and flexibility cannot co-exist, we find it’s an intriguing and worthy challenge to figure out how to achieve both at once.  

The Reality 

Simplicity and powerful extensibility are not unrelated, but they can be independently improved and evaluated. Here’s a better way to visualize the graph above: 

The Proposal 

I propose that we hold software to a higher standard, and that we use this list of attributes as a scorecard to help in the evaluation of software. This scorecard is also valuable for software development teams to evaluate the quality of their own software, and to strive for improvement. Though these attributes are focused on enterprise software, they are applicable for many consumer-facing products/services as well.   

The 11 Attributes of Extensible & Consumable Software 

1. One can set up a new account (or, if on-prem, one can install the product) in 30 minutes or less 

2. Value seen within the first hour of use 

3. Full external-facing API 

4. The product’s UI uses the user-facing API exclusively. In other words, the UI does not depend on any API calls or interfaces that are not documented and available to customers. 

5. Authentication is customizable within the product’s UI 

6. The UI has a customizable look & feel 

7. The UI can be extended with custom modules 

8. Back end logic that can be extended with custom modules in various hook points 

9. Customizations & extensions are upgrade-safe 

10. Full documentation and support for the API, extension framework, and hook points 

11. Rich library of readily-available examples of extensibility 

Techniques for Achieving All 11 Attributes 

Some tips on how to achieve more of the attributes above: 

• Setting up a public location with many extensibility examples. At CloudBolt, this takes the form of public github repository (called the CloudBolt Forge) and a CloudBolt server (called the CloudBolt Content Library), which each installation of CB knows how to query and display available examples so that users can browse extensions and find one to start with.  
• Include time into the software design and implementation schedule to build the right API for new features, build a simple UI, and also make the feature extensible & customizable. 
• If you do not have sufficient time to make it easy and extensible, start with extensibility, and schedule a project to make it easy in the immediate next release. This is a more specific incarnation of Ken Beck’s rule for software: “Make it work, make it right, make it fast. ” One example of this within CloudBolt is synchronizing user permissions. We had very little time to get this feature in initially, so we just exposed a new hook point at the time users log in which allowed customers to write their own synchronization logic, starting with some examples we provided. Not long after that, we followed up with a full UI for configuring synchronization of user permissions that obviated the need for looking at or changing any code. 
• Collaborate in brainstorming. Get a group of creative people together around a [virtual] whiteboard, throw around ideas good and bad for ways to make the software both customizable and easy to use. You may be surprised at what you’re able to come up with together, and at how fun it is.  
• Use the extensibility framework internally! Any time a new feature needs to be developed, ask the question: what if we had to implement this without any changes to the core product code, just using the extensibility framework. If it’s too hard, the extensibility of your product could use improvement.  
• Constantly ask what the easiest way to provide customizability and extensibility would be. Instead of making the customer learn a domain specific language (DSL), could we allow them to program extensions in a language they already know? Instead of requiring them to code from scratch, could we give them a working chunk of code and then let them change it to meet their needs? Or, instead of requiring them to code, could we create a configuration UI for customizing the product? 

Conclusion 

Today, IT professionals have precious little time to administer enterprise systems, but they are also expected to integrate many of them with each other, and also to customize each. Only through enterprise software solutions that are simple to use and administer, and also easy to extend and customize, can we empower IT professionals to succeed in their work. The importance of delivering software that achieves this combination of attributes previously thought to be incompatible is growing constantly, with rising user expectations and the proliferation and heterogeneity of systems that need to be managed.

Experience the leading hybrid cloud management and orchestration solution. Request a CloudBolt demo today.

CloudBolt integrates with a great myriad of technologies in many different categories, with more integrations being added in every release. However, the defining characteristic of CloudBolt’s integrations is not their breadth, but their depth.

For IT administrators, it is not enough for their cloud platform to have surface-level integration; it needs meaningful, substantive support for other technologies so the IT organization can provide a fully-automated self-service experience to their internal (and sometimes external) customers. 

One illustrative example is CloudBolt’s support for VMware. I will list all the ways in which CloudBolt integrates with VMware. The main takeaways are that CloudBolt has the most complete integration with VMware of any cloud management platform, and without all of these features within the integration, the IT team will be left to handle situations manually. The full benefit of automation is only realized when the integration goes this deep. 

The net effect of having this depth of automation for and integration with VMware (and other on-premises virtualization systems) is that IT teams have their private datacenters leveled up with functionality traditionally relegated to the public cloud – self service provisioning, management, and decommissioning of environments by end users without IT’s intervention, modeling cost tracking and implementing shameback/showback, policy-based features such as order approval workflows, enforcement of expiration dates for resources, and power scheduling for VMs to ensure systems do not consume resources when they are not needed.

Features of CloudBolt’s Integration with VMware

vSphere/vCenter/ESX

• VM Build process:
  • Discovery of available clusters, networks, datastores, datastore clusters, VM templates
  • Provisioning using:
    • templates stored in the VMware Content Library
    • normal VM templates
    • a blank VM and a network-boot based build system such as Razor or Cobbler
  • Creation & management of multiple disks
  • Creation & management of multiple network interfaces
    • support for specifying adapter type
  • Guest OS customization
    • Static IP
    • Hostname
  • Setting annotations
  • Auto-selection of the datastore with the most free space
  • Datastore clusters
  • Following progress of the build task
  • Linked clone builds
  • Templatized specification of which VMware folder in which to place new VMs
  • Storage management
    • Define rate multiplier for premium storage backends
    • Limit access to storage backend per group or environment
• VM management:
  • Console
  • Tagging
  • Snapshotting:
    • Creating new ones
    • Auditing existing ones and deleting any past expiration
  • Adding and removing disks, NICs, CPU, memory
  • All the policy-based management features that CloudBolt supports on other platforms, including execution of remote scripts, tracking of expiration dates, chargeback, power scheduling, the ability to log into VMs remotely from the CloudBolt web UI 
• VM Discovery:
  • Detection and storage of 26 distinct attributes on virtual machines 
  • Automatically updating CloudBolt’s dynamic inventory database every 30 minutes with any changes to these attributes on VMs
  • History tracking for all changes, including those made in CloudBolt and those discovered. This allows reporting on change history over time, including the built-in ability to compute how CPU and GB memory hours each server used over the course of a month.

VMware Cloud on AWS

• Everything supported by CloudBolt’s vCenter integration above

NSX

• Deployment and configuration of  fenced networks
• Support for load balancers
• Support for edge gateways 
• Micro-segmented firewall rules (tagging)
• Extension-friendly API wrapper to enable any NSX use cases like NAT’ing, custom route configurations, etc.

vRealize Orchestrator

• Discovery of flows:
  • Automatic discovery of flow inputs
  • Ability to map those inputs to CloudBolt attributes
• Ability to set up a flow at any trigger point in CloudBolt, which allows it to run at many points during the provisioning process, be presented as a button on the server details page, run as a recurring job and many other places.
• This allows reuse of existing investment in vRO workflows for the CloudBolt customers who have switched from vRA to CloudBolt

vCloud Director

• Deploying VMs via vCloud Director
• Discovery of existing VMs
• Management of existing VMs
• Useful for orgs that want to modernize their cloud platform, but are not yet ready to remove vCloud Director

Conclusion

For a cloud platform to deliver on its promise of self-service IT, it needs to have deep interactions with external systems, feature-rich integrations which do IT’s previously-manual work for them. This post covers the depth of CloudBolt’s integration with VMware, but a similar dive could be taken into all the other integrations CloudBolt provides out of the box and as importable content in its hosted Content Library. 

As always, if there are more aspects of integration you would like to see, we would love to hear from you. The list above has been fueled by excellent ideas from our customers over the last nine years.

See these powerful VMware integrations in action. Request a CloudBolt demo today.

CloudBolt has been busy developing a tool that is intended to analyze your vRealize Automation 7 environment and provide helpful feedback on areas where you can optimize. The tool collects data on dozens of vRealize Automation 7 constructs such as number of blueprints, types of blueprints, number of business groups, network profiles, reservations, etc. and looks for key indicators to see if there is room for optimization. It also goes a step further and looks for items that could create challenges when customers are looking to migrate to vRealize Automation 8.

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CloudBolt sponsored and attended VMworld 2019 in San Francisco (with 12 CloudBolters in attendance!) and it was an energy-packed event. I’ll summarize some of the news and talk from the conference here.

VMWare’s main announcements

Last week, VMware announced the release of:

• Tanzu – their Kubernetes orchestrator, essentially an answer to Google’s Anthos.
• Project Pacific – the effort to embed a container runtime into vSphere and provide visibility into both containers and VMs from within the vSphere UI.
• Updates to VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AKA VMC on AWS) – including accelerated GPU Services and a new study showing cost savings in moving to VMC on AWS.

Analysis of VMware’s Direction 

Shift of focus from IT to developers

VMware has traditionally focused on selling products and services to IT departments, but their messaging and product direction are steering toward selling to developers. This is likely in response to VMware’s observation that the locus of decision-making and the budget for technology are shifting toward development teams over time. 

Embracing of containers

With both Project Pacific and Tanzu, it’s clear that VMware is now betting on containers and does not want to miss that train. These two projects will embed a container runtime in vSphere and provide a Kubernetes cluster management tool (playing in the same space as Google’s Anthos).

Emphasis on VMC on AWS

VMC on AWS is a key part of the hybrid cloud story that VMware is delivering. The idea is to keep running workloads on VMware ESXi, and using vCenter to manage them, but the servers run in data centers owned by AWS instead of customer-owned and operated data centers. This is appealing as it allows large organizations to swap their capex spend out for opex, and to do it without making major changes to applications to run using modern public cloud services and/or containers. The possibility remains that organizations could move applications off VMC on AWS to just AWS or a different cloud, so it will be interesting to see how VMware handles that long-term.

vRA 8 Announced

VMware officially announced vRealize Automation 8, the rewrite of their Cloud Management Platform. We talked with a lot of vRA 7.x customers who are wondering what the path forward looks like for them. vRA 8.0 will have some good new features (like more agnostic public cloud support, more flexible blueprints than vRA 7, and potentially enhanced extensibility), but that it will have a subset of the features of vRA 7. It remains to be seen when upgrades from vRA 7 to 8 will be supported, or how difficult they will be when that day comes. It’s also unclear whether old-style extensions will be supported.

What this Means for CloudBolt

Since 2011, CloudBolt has been focusing on meeting the needs of both:

1. Empowering developers with a simple self-service way to obtain the resources they need to do their job AND
2. Turning the central IT team into superheroes, giving them unmatched visibility and the ability to orchestrate and automate everything

At CloudBolt, we are passionate about the themes VMware brought up. Here’s how CloudBolt stacks up in these themes:

Summarizing, CloudBolt has been focused on the themes that matter most to IT and developers and the product has matured over many years of releases and management of production environments for global 2000 companies.

What’s Next

We look forward to heading back to VMworld in 2020, and in the meantime you can find us at upcoming VMware User Group (VMUG) gatherings in Boston (9/25), Atlanta (10/2) and Phoenix (10/30) this fall. Stop by to chat with us!

Want to see how CloudBolt stacks up with vRA? Download our datasheet today.