Last January, we introduced the next chapter of multicloud application and workflow management with CloudCenter Suite, in a new version that brings significant new functionality and capabilities with the addition of Cost Optimizer and Action Orchestrator.
Now CloudCenter Suite is also available “as a Service” (SaaS), promising to make things easier for customers with zero installation and maintenance.
Besides the typical benefits of a SaaS offering and the fact that a multicloud management tool belongs… well… in the cloud, there is another good use case where it can be a great fit: to boost agility for teams with urgent projects.
While the effort required to deploy CloudCenter Suite (CCS) and get it up and running quickly on-prem has been significantly reduced – with a reimagined Suite Installer, Suite Admin and the ability to deploy it on top of any Kubernetes infrastructure, in many cases deploying such a tool can require a tight negotiation between IT and a DevOps team, with valuable time being lost between requesting and implementation.
So what happens when you have an urgent application development project that requires access to multiple cloud infrastructure, role and access segregation, policy and cost control?
This is where the SaaS version can come handy, especially for development teams with limited infrastructure skillset and tight deadlines. With a few clicks, a highly-available and completely isolated CloudCenter Suite environment is created for your team to use, delivered as a Service from Cisco.
After you are up and running, you can easily hand over administrative tasks such as user creation, group and role mapping to your members; CloudCenter Suite is especially expedient if authentication is integrated with single sign-on methods.
Using Workload Manager, developers can then start associating cloud accounts, setting budgets, composing application profiles and creating infrastructure environments into which they will deploy applications.
Using the Cost Optimizer module and reporting functionality, you can quickly evaluate on-prem and public cloud infrastructure options based on cost or monitor your application’s growth trends for future cost-related decisions. A benefit of Cost Optimizer is that it can be also used to identify cost-saving opportunities for existing workloads, not associated with the application we are deploying, and suggest changes from one instance type to another.
Your Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) can use Cloud Remote to connect to existing on-prem or public cloud environments securely (using SSL), without the need to create multiple VPN tunnels.
Developers and SREs can then work together to connect their deployment toolchain to CCS, while Action Orchestrator can do the “dirty groundwork” of automating manual tasks, such as creating and configuring a Virtual Private Cloud environment in AWS or an equivalent configuring a resource pool in an on-prem VMware cloud, or automating the repetitive manual steps to integrate a PaaS offering and make it readily available to your development team.
The result? Your team can focus on delivering the project on time and uninterrupted, while IT will be happy since everything will fall under their governance guidelines.
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