Morpheus enables continuous delivery and compliance with updates for K8s, VMware, Terraform

Building on a record-setting 2019, Morpheus has released v4.2 of its multi-cloud management platform focused on enabling continuous delivery for customers leveraging Kubernetes, VMware, and Terraform. The release also included continuous compliance updates to the Morpheus policy enforcement engine.

With these enhancements, customers can now:

• Simplify the governance and automation of existing Kubernetes clusters from providers such as Red Hat OpenShift, VMware vSphere 7, and others
• Reduce the cost and complexity of VMware private clouds by combining Morpheus with Cloud Foundation Standard instead of more expensive editions
• Improve the velocity of app modernization with automation updates including a Morpheus Terraform provider and updated ServiceNow plug-in
• Reduce risk and assure compliance with continuous tag enforcement policy engine available for VMware, AWS, and Azure clouds

In the first quarter of 2020, Morpheus has already had 2 major software releases and has grown at triple-digit rates, validating what Gartner Inc. noted about the company’s Leadership in their 2020 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms.

“The pace of change in hybrid cloud and DevOps is driving demand for self-service platforms which can bring order to the influx of new technologies,” says Brad Parks, VP, Business Development at Morpheus Data. “Our ability to quickly unify complex environments and automate workflows across clouds has led to a number of major competitive wins already this year.”

Eliminate Kubernetes silos with unified orchestration of VMs and Containers

According to a recent 451 Research survey, 36% of organizations have currently adopted Kubernetes, and another 21% are in the discovery/proof-of-concept phase. However, most organizations also continue to maintain VM-based applications and are starting to use cloud-native PaaS services leading to an untenable level of complexity.

Morpheus provides a unified orchestration framework that simplifies management across VMs, Containers, Bare Metal, and public cloud services. With v4.2, Morpheus has added support for brownfield Kubernetes clusters in addition to CNCF Certified Morpheus Kubernetes Service and integration with EKS and AKS.

Additionally, the Morpheus Kubernetes Service has been CNCF certified up to version 1.17.

Using the new external Kubernetes cluster support, customers can connect to any existing Kubernetes deployment to instantly add robust governance policy and simple self-service provisioning. This means enterprises using technologies such as Red Hat OpenShift in initial Kubernetes projects can bring those clusters into the same control plane as on-prem hypervisors and public cloud stacks. It also reduces risk for customers looking at the new VMware vSphere 7 release which includes Kubernetes.

Reduce the cost and complexity of VMware private clouds and VCF deployments

VMware recently announced the upcoming availability of vSphere 7 as well as VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4 as essential services for hybrid cloud. However, for VCF customers wanting self-service automation across multiple clouds the only option from VMware is to be locked into the more expensive Enterprise edition of VCF.

Morpheus is a Best of VMworld winner for Automation and offers a simple and more flexible alternative for customers who want to realize the value of a VMware-based software-defined datacenter. By combining Morpheus with the Standard edition of VCF, Morpheus provides leading cloud management functionality at a lower TCO.

The new Morpheus v4.2 release adds a number of updates for VMware NSX including the ability to create and manage logical routers, switches, firewalls, edge gateways, and IP pools. Additionally, role permissions and network quota policies can now be set for tenants, groups, roles, and users to granularly control NSX network access.

These NSX enhancements build on already advanced built-in VMware integrations including integration with vRealize Orchestrator, VMware Cloud on AWS, vSphere, vCloud Director, and VMware Integrated OpenStack.

Customers can automate provisioning, manage datastores and resource groups, migrate and convert images, auto-scale VMware applications, leverage VMware tagging, and more.

Enable everything-as-code with Terraform provider and ServiceNow plug-in

The concept of Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is a core practice among mature DevOps organizations. Morpheus has been a DevOps oriented multi-cloud management platform since inception and supports its own native IaC templating language in addition to providing support for Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM, and HELM.

With the popularity of HashiCorp Terraform, Morpheus has expanded integration with the recent beta release of its own Terraform provider which will codify all of the continuous automation requirements not inherent to Terraform.

With this integration, customers will be able to utilize Morpheus as a state management and policy engine for actions called from the Terraform CLI. This will also enable customers to simplify Terraform deployments and benefit from Morpheus’ 80+ built-in integrations.

Other automation updates in the recent Morpheus release include plug-in updates for ServiceNow enabling the easy integration of Morpheus managed application blueprints into the ServiceNow service catalog. This effectively enables ServiceNow integration with Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM, and other Infrastructure-as-Code template types.

Reduce risk with continuous tag enforcement and compliance policies

Attaching metadata tags to provisioned VMs and Cloud Instances is a common way of managing cost center assignments, project teams, and other important business information. Unfortunately, this common practice suffers from a lack of consistency and a lack of enforcement which renders it effectively useless in many cases.

Using Morpheus as the provisioning engine for new application deployments can assure tags are consistently applied but often Enterprises are dealing with messy brownfield environments that lack proper governance.

With the new Tag Enforcement and Compliance Policy administrators can strictly enforce tag compliance globally or with specific clouds, groups, and users. Morpheus workflow automation can run against brownfield instances to scan for non-compliance, apply missing tags, and bring those instances into compliance.

Custom variables and option lists can be used plus multiple tag policies can be combined to enforce a comprehensive tag compliance program.