Morpheus Data signaled it will pursue a more open strategy when it comes to enabling DevOps teams to manage multiple cloud platforms.
Brad Parks, vice president of marketing and business development for Morpheus Data, said updates to the company’s namesake platform will make it possible for DevOps teams to swap in third-party modules and components even when Morpheus has already provided that equivalent functionality in the platform. This more open approach is being driven by a recognition that in many cases DevOps teams are being required to implement a specific corporate standard, Parks said.
The latest edition of the Morpheus cloud management platform adds support for Kubernetes container orchestration software, Terraform configuration management software developed by HashiCorp and Microsoft Azure Resource Manager. Morpheus already has its own JSON/YAML scripting framework. But it’s clear more declarative approaches to managing cloud resources using, for example, Kubernetes or Terraform are starting to gain traction, Parks noted.
At the same time, Morpheus is adding connectors to cloud services from Oracle and T-Systems.
At its core, the Morpheus cloud management platform enables DevOps teams to consolidate analytics, reporting, governance, monitoring, logging and data protection within a single platform. Most organizations today either already are or expect to soon employ multiple clouds. Each of those clouds will be running different classes of workloads as IT organizations move to keep their cloud service provider options open. At the same time, Morpheus Data is betting that, rather than mastering separate management consoles for each cloud, organizations will move to centralize the management of multiple clouds as much as possible, Parks said.
Parks noted Morpheus Data is also starting to see DevOps teams hooking up their preferred continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform to the Morpheus cloud platform. That approach provides them with a platform to manage applications starting the minute a CI/CD pipeline finishes pushing them into production, he said.
CI/CD platforms and other DevOps tools are great when it comes to building and deploying applications, but currently a gap exists between how those applications are built and deployed versus managed when deployed in a production environment. Morpheus is designed to provide an open flexible approach to closing that gap, Parks said.
Interest in various approaches to automating the management of IT is clearly on the rise. Most organizations simply don’t have enough IT staff to manage large numbers of applications being deployed at scale. In fact, Parks said Morpheus Data is seeing a marked rise in the number of managed service providers focused on DevOps and cloud management services.
Regardless of how the integration of DevOps and cloud management is achieved, it’s clear IT processes are being transformed. The day when silos within IT organizations implemented various levels of IT automation based on various capabilities of platforms is starting to give way to a more comprehensive approach. The real challenge now is figuring out how to achieve that goal with the least amount of reasonable disruption to the culture of the IT organization as possible.
