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Core elements of a cloud
management platform
According to market research company,
Gartner, the CMP sector is a steadily
growing yet extremely fragmented market
with over 20 active providers. However,
market researchers are anticipating market
consolidation. As things currently stand, a
company is spoiled for choice when it comes
to deciding on a CMP solution. As a guide,
Gartner has defined five essential functions a
CMP solution should offer:
Matthias Pfützner, Cloud Solution Architect
at Red Hat
breed approaches. Even the biggest public
cloud providers can hardly cover all specific
company requirements in full – Amazon
Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google
Cloud Platform supply different offers and
services. It is also understandable that they
do this because they want to differentiate
themselves from one another.
Generally speaking, an ‘everything from
under one roof’ solution is unrealistic.
Moreover, opting for one single cloud
provider would inevitably make companies
heavily dependent on said provider, which is
precisely what companies want to avoid.
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Service request management
Provisioning, orchestration and automation
Governance and policy
Monitoring and metering
Multicloud brokering
The first three points are especially
important. A CMP solution should contain
self-service portals and functions such
as for role-based access to IT service
catalogues and automatic provisioning.
Automation is another key aspect. Red
Hat’s CMP solution, Red Hat CloudForms,
for example, offers native Ansible
integration. Ansible by Red Hat is a high-
performance, agent-less open source
automation platform that supports
simple designing of automated processes.
The integration of high-performance
automation functions in multicloud
environments decreases complexity
and greatly improves the performance
and security of traditional and cloud
native applications. If nothing else, the
multicloud management platform must
offer the option of defining and monitoring
governance and compliance standards with
individually defined policies – through the
automatic implementation of guidelines.
Future-proof CMP solutions must also meet
the following basic requirements:
• Integration with existing enterprise
management systems and processes
• Capacity, resource and
performance management
• Configuration and change management
with regard to applications, middleware
and infrastructure software
• Identity management, for
example, with consistent access control
to the infrastructure
If a company goes with a multicloud
model, it can’t avoid using a CMP solution.
This is the only way that heterogeneous
environments can be administered
uniformly and efficiently. And moreover,
a modern CMP application boasts wide-
ranging advantages, from quicker service
deployment, to improved operational
transparency and controlling, through to
guaranteed compliance and governance. n
Using multiple cloud platforms entails
difficulties in itself as these are characterised
by different technologies, interfaces and
processes, and are therefore not 100%
compatible with one another. Consequently,
implementing a multicloud model is not a
simple process, particularly with regard to
consistent management. It involves tasks
such as automatic provisioning, workload
balancing, resource optimisation and
capacity and lifecycle management.
If a company uses its own tools for each
individual platform, it is evident that this
will make handling more complex for its
IT department. Using cloud management
platforms (CMP) is therefore necessary,
as these offer administrative functions for
heterogeneous private, public, hybrid and
multicloud environments.
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