CA Technologies’ AppLogic Suite enables Automated Service Delivery, #Cloud Style #devops
I had an opportunity to sit down with CA Technologies and talk cloud with a focus on cloud management last month and discovered a robust portfolio of automation and orchestration solutions.
CA has been a staple name in the enterprise for more than a decade so it’s no surprise they understand the need for as turnkey solutions as possible. Pre-integrated and pre-packaged with plenty of easy buttons is desirable, as long as there remains room for customization. The fine folks at CA are focused on hybrid service delivery these days, comprising physical and virtual devices across public and private environments unified by "one point of control." This includes a catalog of services (a registry, if you’re coming from a SOA perspective) as well as pre-integrated and pre-tested process flows that enable rapid deployment of automated processes.
AppLogic is its cloud management platform (CMP) designed as a turnkey solution for service providers. It relies on an environment comprised of commodity components and attempts to minimize the amount of code required to build, maintain and use a cloud environment.
Its framework is capable of executing scripts to perform mundane deployment and configuration tasks such as mounting a volume or configuring a VLAN. It’s model is similar to that of CloudStack and OpenStack but uses its own language, ADL (Application Definition Language). The advantage for CA here is in its visual editor tool for constructing flows and tasks, something lacking in other efforts.
It claims to provide an entire "cloud stack" including:
- Server management
- Embedded SAN
- SDN
- Resource quotas
- Design studio
- Metering
- Security
Its claim to SDN is much like other, pre-existing solutions that leverage an automated and dynamic configuration paradigm. It creates connections automatically between virtual machines and the Internet, leverages its own DPI for security and consistent latency both ingress and egress from the virtual machine. Network virtualization is really CA’s SDN game here, as the fabric created by AppLogic takes advantage of its own packet encapsulation to enable route domain isolation, security, and bandwidth enforcement.
Its embedded SAN was interesting in that it’s a completely software-based construct that simulates a block level SAN comprised of DAS.
While CA is aiming at service providers with AppLogic, its easy to believe that a large enough enterprise would find value in a cloud management platform that is more fully fleshed out than competing offerings.