If you wanted to start a new company tomorrow it would be easy to look at the tech landscape and the prevalent trends and decide to just build everything around a DevOps culture from the beginning. Most of the companies in the world already exist, though, and they already have processes, tools in place. Making the move from legacy to DevOps isn’t just a moment-in-time decision—it’s an arduous journey over time.
That’s where CloudBolt comes in. I had a chance last week to speak with CloudBolt CEO Jon Mittelhauser and CloudBolt CTO Bernard Sanders about the company, its vision, and the latest version of the CloudBolt platform. Mittelhauser explained that what customers appreciate about CloudBolt is the ability to transition from the past to the future on their own schedule.
One of the problems with change is that it takes time. While the new process or tool you’re moving to might be better in every way, getting there can be a challenge. In the meantime you’re forced to manage and maintain disparate systems or platforms—both the old and the new. CloudBolt wants to help organizations reduce the chaos by providing a single platform that enables customers to administer all of the above.
Large enterprises in particular don’t just adopt a new technology en masse. One site or department might start to use DevOps tools and processes out of necessity. Another department might also embrace DevOps—but choose different platforms and tools. Mittenhauser explained that even if the entire organization is on the same page about which DevOps tools and processes to use the transition occurs slowly over time—often by attrition as licenses expire or platforms reach the end of their support lifespan. Those customers still need a way to view and manage their entire ecosystem throughout the slow evolution.
CloudBolt also shared that one of its newest customers—the London Borough of Camden—has adopted CloudBolt to get better insight and control of its vast virtual environment. “At a time of austerity in government, running a low-cost, flexible hybrid cloud service for our customers is essential. CloudBolt provides a service that enables our customers to get the compute power they need, on demand, increasing their productivity and reducing our administrative overheads,” said John Jackson, Assistant Director (ICT), London Borough of Camden.
Sanders claims that CloudBolt v5—released Wednesday, May 27—makes it easier for IT admins to manage activities, applications, and services across a multi-cloud, multi-platform environment. He described a variety of new features in v5. According to the press release the list of new features includes:
- powerful new service catalog functionality to facilitate complex, multi-tier app deployments
- provisioning of service catalog blueprints available through both the CloudBolt web interface and a powerful REST API
- deeper out-of-the box integration with technologies such as VMware, OpenStack, AWS, Azure, Infoblox, Puppet and Chef
- ability to define arbitrary server actions so DevOps experts can provide simple buttons for users to perform complex operations on servers
- ability to snapshot VMs from the CloudBolt user interface
- increased control for administrators, including the ability to set rate-based limits and set limits on environments in addition to groups and handlers
- significant UI improvements, including adding social aspects to the interface
- even deeper extensibility – additional trigger points for hooks/actions
- revamped docs, now made public: http://docs.cloudbolt.io
- new trigger points for power on/off, rebooting servers and post-order completion process have been introduced and currency units are no longer limited to USD
In many ways it would be easier to just switch gears and embrace the DevOps culture throughout an organization, but with large enterprises—and even some medium or smaller organizations—that is simply unrealistic. For organizations that are maintaining multiple technologies and environments during that transition a tool like CloudBolt can help IT monitor and manage everything efficiently.
Existing CloudBolt customer can download the latest version from the support portal.