We’ve seen the use of cloud technologies explode in the past five years, but what happens when you need to adjust your cloud strategy? Whether you’ve over-invested in public cloud, relied too much on your private datacenter, or are looking to create more redundancies to prevent data loss, having a proper exit strategy from your current cloud environment is critical. We’re joined by Sanity Solutions’ Chris Gross to discuss the growing need for exit strategies, why a hybrid strategy is optimal, and how to start crafting the right exit for you and your business.

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In part one of our deep-dive into CI/CD trends and best practices, we’re joined by E Einowski to discuss the growing needs for Continuous Integration and Continuous Testing. Before you can deliver and deploy, it’s crucial to automate as many integration and testing processes no matter the size of your dev team. Join us to learn the best ways to implement proper CD and CT.

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Cloud technology has come a long way and continues to evolve. This week I’m joined by Aberdeen’s Jim Rapoza to take a look at where the cloud is now, where it’s come from, and make a few guesses at where it’s going. Are you using the right technologies? Do you have the right mix of public and private clouds? Tune in to find out!

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The cloud is no longer new, and ingrained processes around managing it are the norm. But, is the old way still the best way? We’re joined by CloudBolt’s Grant Ho to discuss the ways cloud automation is introducing new processes and new possibilities for your cloud environment.

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We’re joined this week by Kumolus Co-founder and CloudBolt CTO Michael Salleo to discuss what we’re dubbing “the governance problem”. We explore the growing oversight challenges that every organization deals with in regards to cloud usage, how those challenges change based on company size, industry, and the ways they aren’t so different across the board. What issues have arisen during the pandemic? Can you define a term as broad as “cloud governance”? Can governance be automated? We answer these questions and more.

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What does Cloud Management mean in 2021? Does the term mean too many things to too many people?

Is there still a use for a Cloud Management Platform? On this week’s Cloud Junkies we explore these questions and more with CloudBolt CTO, Rick Kilcoyne, and search for answers while attempting to lend some clarity to an industry that has seen rapid expansion in the past few years.

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On the very first episode of The Cloud Junkies, I sit down with CloudBolt’s founders, Auggy da Rocha and Bernard Sanders, for a discussion about the evolution of cloud technology, how it ties into both the founding and growth of CloudBolt, and explore what it takes to grow a cloud management company from the ground up.

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CloudBolt is committed to delivering solutions that our customers need during their hybrid cloud and multi-cloud journeys. On the heels of our 2020 acquisitions of SovLabs and Kumolus, we’re excited to share that these products are coming together to meet our customers in their digital transformations.  

We’re pleased to share several new features across our portfolio of cloud management and integration solutions to help customers accelerate and simplify their hybrid and multi-cloud journeys. Our January release provides enhancements to support greater collaboration with DevOps teams, richer integrations for Terraform and VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), as well as improved cost management capabilities for both public and private cloud workloads.  

New Integration Capabilities with Ansible Tower and Support for Scripting-as-a-Service 

The release of OneFuse 1.2, the only codeless integration platform for infrastructure automation, introduces a new module for integration support with Ansible Tower. This integration will enable admins to create their own Ansible-powered services that other teams, tools and scripts can consume via platform providers or API without requiring direct access or understanding of Ansible Tower.  

With this groundbreaking new feature, enterprises can: 

• Create policy-based services for Ansible Tower to provide full lifecycle capabilities, including provisioning, de–provisioning, and day-2 management for easier integrations with other automation tools (vRA, Terraform, CloudBolt, ServiceNow, etc.). 
• Provide governance through guardrails for lifecycle use cases using the OneFuse template engine, which allows OneFuse administrators to use variables to deliver dynamic outcomes.  
• Centralize visibility into provisioning requests using the OneFuse Ansible module and track job execution, requestors, and outcomes. Thus, it becomes one single place to track the complete progress.  

Our OneFuse 1.2 release also includes the introduction of the Scripting Module, which allows customers to create scripting-as-a-service, fully inventoried and reusable across automation platforms and tools. With this feature users can: 

• Easily turn one-off scripts into reusable services that can be consumed by automation tools or service catalogs. We like to think of this as: “write once and use it everywhere.” 

• Achieve centralized management and visibility into script deployments and outcomes along with full audit capabilities. 
• Utilize role-based access control to ensure scripts are executed by the right teams and tools. This helps IT maintain control on their resources.  
• Execute scripts without a third-party agent – the OneFuse Scripting Module is agentless and lightweight. 
• Trace and identify any changes made to systems (typically seen as part of day-2 operations) where the original content of a target system has been modified by a script.

The types of scripts users can include but are not limited to: 

• Return the timestamp by running date on a target machine 
• Run yum install mariadb on CREATE and yum remove mariadb on DELETE to install/uninstall mariadb. 
• Modify users and groups on a target VM 
• Enumerate running services on a Windows VM 
• Patch a Linux VM by running yum update -y or apt-get upgrade  
• Any Linux (Bash) or Windows (PowerShell) script 

Cost optimization capabilities for VMware vCenter and Azure environments through Kumolus

We announced the acquisition of Kumolus, an award-winning cloud cost management platform, in Q3 last year and we’re excited that acquisition is now complete. This Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform supports cost management, optimization and compliance for public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.  

Through our winter release, Kumolus now supports VMware vCenter. This support was requested by our customers who want to manage their on-premises environment through the powerful Kumolus platform. They asked for an easier way to optimize resources managed through vCenter and the same granular visibility they have for AWS and Azure. Through this support, customers can now: 

• Gain the same level of visibility into their vCenter environments. This is through powerful Kumolus reports and dashboards. 
• Optimize on-premises better through our accurate rightsizing recommendations. These recommendations help customers identify idle resources that eat into their budget.  
• Schedule checks across the environment and get alerted when certain conditions are met, for instance, when CPU usage drops below 10% for a week.  

We’ve also added more optimization capabilities within Kumolus for the Azure environment. For customers invested in Azure looking to find opportunities to automatically save money, this will be a game–changer. Many times, these services are overlooked through no fault of the user. Now, based on your usage, Kumolus finds you saving opportunities for the following services in addition to our current support:  

• Load balancers 
• Unused snapshots 
• Public IPs 
• Idle disks 

You can also customize reports and dashboards within Kumolus. Thus, if you are a CFO (or CISO, CFO, cloud admin) and you’re interested in seeing certain data points you can do that very easily. Thus, all your important KPIs can be found on a single dashboard. Also, you can create favorite reports and check the information by user, function, services, etc., and save all the reports under your favorites tab.  

If you’re interested in trending information it’s simple to compare information, such as resource usage by a user, over certain days, months, or years. You can define the period for that comparison to get a direct answer to your questions. 

Finally, Kumolus is now pre-integrated with Slack for alerts and notifications. Thus, when certain user–defined conditions are met (CPU usage, compliance deviations, etc.) a certain user or channel gets notified immediately in Slack. This helps you monitor and manage your environment better by reducing your reaction time (more integrations for alerting coming soon). 

Richer Terraform integration for DevOps in CloudBolt 9.4.4 

In our 9.4.4 release, CloudBolt Cloud Management Platform has enhanced Terraform support by adding new Terraform Orchestration Actions. These hooks enable CloudBolt administrators to customize Terraform’s execution via user defined CloudBolt Plugin code. These hooks can help:  

• Modify and manage Terraform resources  
• Introspect generated Terraform State  
• Configure credentials for a Terraform Provider  
• Send Slack messages on success of provisioning, etc. 
• Perform any other organization-specific workflow tasks  

These actions provide tools for admins to customize Terraform integration and avoid Professional Services engagements. 

To see all these features in action, schedule a demo today.

AWS re:Invent is typically a big draw this time of year. It has been symbolic to closing a year in technology strong in Las Vegas. This year, because of the COVID-19 pandemic it’s been moved to an all-online format. (For some people, that might be a good excuse to set up casino floors at home, too!) Let’s talk what has been announced so far at this three week-long event.

1. Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Anywhere: Did you dream of running ECS management within your own data centers? I am sure that many healthcare, finance and government customers would want to manage containers better. AWS just announced this to have consistent management planes in both environments. It promises to containerize the on-premises workloads for data centers and then connecting them to AWS cloud as needed.
2. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes (EKS) Anywhere: Similar to ECS Anywhere, EKS Anywhere lets you run your Kubernetes-based containers in your data center to deploy, upgrade and operate the clusters. This will simplify the management and deployment of clusters for more power in your hands.
3. AWS Outposts get smaller for remote facilities: For any bank, manufacturer, or healthcare provider, challenges amplify when you have a remote facility somewhere. That facility might be critical enough that it needs to be supported by IT but without using major resources. The facility could be serving a niche client or a lab. For that, AWS Outpost might provide a simple solution for this and it is now coming in two smaller flavors. These Outpost options will not only be small (1U and 2Us) but they will also connect to other AWS services such as EC2, ECS, etc. Thus, less management overhead for IT while empowering users in those remote facilities.
4. New EC2 Mac instances: This is an unexpected release. This will help AWS users run macOS on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), underscoring that AWS is a customer-first organization at its core.
5. New EC2 instances: Amazon has been talking about different chip manufacturers to provide more value to its customers: faster speed at cheaper price points. They are rolling out new EC2 instances based on AMD GPUs, AWS Graviton processors, etc. These new instances will provide more flexibility to the end users while giving more scale to AWS. That’s a win-win.

To learn more about AWS re:Invent stay tuned and stay connected! We are just getting started. In the meantime, please check out our new Guide to AWS Cost Optimization.