Cloudify 6 simplifies the continuous management of large-scale deployments

Cloudify 6 launches, introducing Environment as a Service 2.0: a new hierarchical environment management capability that simplifies the continuous management of large-scale deployments.

Cloudify 6 provides an “orchestrator of orchestrators” for large enterprises and service providers who need to orchestrate infrastructure that is optimized for both legacy and cloud-native applications, across both dev/test and production environments. Cloudify 6 was designed for organizations that want to simplify the management of Kubernetes and Terraform at scale.

“Our large enterprise users have consistently told us that legacy and cloud native applications will live side by side in their infrastructure environments,” said Ariel Dan, CEO of Cloudify. “They need simpler ways to manage those legacy and cloud native apps, and moving workloads close to the edge only complicates this reality. Since most of these organizations use an IaC solution like Terraform, they need an ‘orchestrator of orchestrators’ solution that does not require replacement of their IaC solutions. That’s what we’ve built with Cloudify 6. With it, we’ve seen improvements of 50% in production environments and more than 200% in dev environments. It’s a dramatic game changer for anyone managing diverse environments at scale.”

Built to optimize Terraform environments

Terraform users get a dynamic workspace environment in Cloudify 6, one that seamlessly organizes templates and modules into development, staging and production environments. Cloudify 6 manages the dependencies among these workspaces, executing operations across multiple environments from one interface.

This environment as a service manages state files, secrets and runtime properties as well as logging across multiple environments from a centralized location. Terraform users can also integrate their projects with the rest of the environment network and with Ansible. Cloudify 6 deployments also can interoperate with other orchestration tools such as AWS Cloud Formation or Azure ARM without wasting time on writing Glue code. Users also can run different versions of Terraform per environment simultaneously, streamlining upgrade processes.

Automatically discover and create multi Kubernetes clusters

Kubernetes users can automatically discover and create multi Kubernetes clusters in Cloudify 6 with built-in support for AWS EKS, Azure AKS, Google GKE and Red Hat OpenShift. The release brings a new service-oriented management framework, focused primarily on managing the distributed service deployment and ongoing day-2 operations across multiple Kubernetes clusters and hybrid environments. This includes the ability to deploy the same instance of a service across multiple clusters in a single command, resume from partial-failure scenarios, monitor drifts and more.

Managing highly distributed environments

Cloudify 6 also introduces support for managing highly distributed environments with a new map view that provides filters and labels for managing multiple sites, multiple regions and multiple cloud environments, all based on these deployments’ geographical location. Filters and tagging let users easily group environments and deploy or update services on specific groups.

“Prior to Cloudify, we delivered complex automation use cases using in-house developed APIs,” said Connor Brown, lead cloud engineer at 84.51°. “This required us to maintain infrastructure, contracts, authentication, etc. for our APIs. With Cloudify we can focus our time on the automation logic without worrying about the overhead of an in-house API. Additionally, we can use Cloudify to automate updates to environments using the update workflow.

“Updates previously took the cloud team hours to complete and limited how many environments we could support. Updates are now even easier with the new Environment as a Service 2.0 features in Cloudify 6. Cloudify has contributed to significantly reducing the toil experienced by the cloud team.”