Overcome Multi-Cloud Management Complexity

Let’s First Understand What is Multi-Cloud Management

Multi-cloud management involves managing cloud computing workloads or cloud

service applications from multiple cloud vendors. A multi-cloud environment

could be all-private or all-public or hybrid cloud which is a combination of both.

Advantages of Multi-Cloud Strategy

A multi-cloud strategy allows you to adopt different cloud services from different

cloud vendors or providers, you can customize your infrastructure according to

your business goals, you can take advantage of strengths of different cloud

vendors, it gives you flexibility to optimize your cost and performance, provides

ability to avoid vendor lock-in and minimize downtime and data loss.

Challenges of Multi-Cloud Strategy

A multi-cloud approach is ideal for most of the businesses but there are a few

challenges to it as well.

Security

There is a flipside of putting all your eggs into different baskets, it can make it

harder to secure your data and prevent leakage, having said that there are

security benefits to it as well as it provides greater protection against attacks.

Underutilization of Multi-Cloud

Poor multi-cloud management becomes the key reason to bear unwanted

expenses. Say, you’ve integrated multiple cloud services in your application,

chances are, you may not utilize all the benefits of the cloud to their full capacity.

This way, you end up paying for the services that are not even used.

Cloud Sprawl

Cloud sprawl occurs when users fail to decommission non used cloud computing

resources or services, the main reason being the workloads that frequently move

between clouds. This makes it challenging to get resource visibility and brings in:

a. Increased operational complexity and cost

b. Lack of visibility related to the spend/cost

c. Risk of security breaches

d. Lapses in regulatory and internal policy compliance

Managing Multi-Cloud

When an enterprise uses multiple public and private clouds, managing their multi-

cloud setup brings in many complexities and challenges which the IT team and the

business has to deal with.

Multi-Cloud Management is one of the biggest challenges faced in the current

times. Service providers (SPs), managed service providers (MSPs), and systems

integrators (SIs) alike are pursuing an unprecedented opportunity created by the

proliferation of cloud services. With Multi-Cloud Management Platform, Small

and Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs), Enterprises and Government Agencies, are

all experiencing an explosive growth in the proliferation of cloud services by their

users and customers. Cloud services includes software-as-a-service (SaaS),

platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), or the proverbial

anything-as-a-service (XaaS). In fact, for IaaS services we are now invariably

looking at multi-cloud management services.

Overcoming Multi-Cloud Management Challenges

Jamcracker's Multi-Cloud Management Platform – provides the solution

Jamcracker Cloud Platform is a time-tested, standards-based, globalized,

multi-tier, multi-tenant, multi-cloud platform that enables SPs, MSPs and

SIs alike to get to market faster and in a more cost-effective manner.

As defined by Gartner the Access Management component provides the

ability to manage users and enable them to access cloud services and

perform various activities based on permissions.

A cloud management platform needs to have an easy to use user

administration, role-based privileges, and identity and access management

capabilities.

The Service Management capabilities include catalog management, service

provisioning, billing, chargeback, invoicing etc.

A strong Cloud Management Platform (CMP) should optimize the usage of

cloud resources and should have optimization features such as defining and

automation of policies, monitoring of resources, and out-of-box APIs to

integrate to external resources.

If you have been thinking about streamlining your multi-cloud services

management, then exploring the Jamcracker Cloud Management Platform

is a worthwhile endeavor. Jamcracker enables SPs, MSPs and SIs to offer

infrastructure services such as Compute, Storage, Application Stacks, and

Networks to their customers through a production-ready platform.

The Jamcracker Platform enables SPs, MSPs and SIs to provide their

customers with a single pane of glass approach for:

o Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB)

o Cloud Management Platform(CMP)

o Cloud Governance

o Cloud cost management and Operations Management

o The Jamcracker platform releases that have happened over last two

years provide a very robust set of capabilities including support for:

Multiple CSPs: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, VMware,

OpenStack, IBM Bluemix and others.

Cloud Service Brokerage (CSB): Enabling the brokering of any type of service –

SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, XaaS.

Cloud Management Platform (CMP): Compute, Application Stacks, Block Storage,

Image Management, and Networks.

Microsoft CSP: CSP Direct and Indirect partner support for Microsoft Azure and

Office 365 (40+ services).

Cloud Governance: Metering, Monitoring, Policy Management, Reporting.

Cloud Cost Management: Usage Based Billing, Budgeting, Showback/Chargeback.

Operations Management: Service Orchestration, IT Helpdesk and Ticketing,

Delegated user and Catalog administration, User provisioning.

Key Multi-Cloud Management Platform Capabilities of Jamcracker

Some of the specific multi-cloud management platform capabilities are listed

here:

Jamcracker Platform's Application Stack designer helps organizations

design, deploy and manage everything from VMs, applications, storage to

databases as cloud-based solution stacks.

It enables workload automation and provides the flexibility to automate the

deployment of multi-cloud servers with the required business processes

and applications instantaneously.

You can create VMs or multi-cloud multi-tier Application Stacks using the

Designer.

You can track progress of the VMs and Application Stacks as they are being

created. After launching, you can modify/resize the configuration details

(Flavor, RAM and CPU) of the VMs.

The platform allows you to add/attach new/existing storage volumes (Block

Storage) to your VMs. You can create a volume snapshot at any time you

want.

You can configure networking i.e. which subnet of which VPC would you

like to put the VM or Application Stack under. You can choose from

multiple vNICs to configure the network interfaces to the VMs.

The platform supports multiple Policies. You can choose from an event-

based or scheduled based policy, say, for Monitoring the VMs.

You could decide to monitor parameters such as CPU utilization, RAM

utilization etc.

Policies can be used to automate tasks and actions which might otherwise

need user's intervention. You can monitor and apply policies to VMs,

volumes, Application Stacks. For example, you can create a policy to resize

the instance if your instance's CPU utilization is at the critical level 3 times

in 60 seconds.

The platform provides an easy-to-use UI to access all the VMs and

Application Stacks you have created.

You can also import existing VMs that you have created in your

environment prior to implementing the Jamcracker Platform allowing you

to view/manage the VMs from the Instances page

The widget-based IaaS Dashboard provides you visibility to your

organization's cloud (IaaS) resources. It allows you to view IaaS usage data

using a variety of visualizations such as area graphs and bar charts.

You can use the Budgeting module to define and allocate Budgets by

creating budget codes. You can input your specific budget codes while

creating resources (VMs, Application Stacks etc.).

The system will validate and provide alerts if the cost of services you are

purchasing is exceeding the allocated if the budget. You could also

configure an approval workflow to require admin approval if budget is

being exceeded.

Jamcracker Platform provides a Content Management System (CMS) based

store front allowing you to have a custom look/feel/layout for your portal.

Any Drupal developer can make changes to the CMS based portal.

Since the CMS store is based on Drupal, [35000 plug-ins] it inherently

supports integration to social media, recommend store or service, rating of

services or applications by users of the store etc.