Businesses continually seek to increase flexibility and agility in order to gain competitive advantage and reduce operating cost. The rise of public cloud providers offers one method by which businesses can achieve lower operating costs while gaining competitive advantage. Public clouds provide these advantages by allowing for self-service, on-demand access of compute resources. While the use of public clouds has increased flexibility and agility while reducing costs, it has also presented new challenges in the areas of portability, governance, security, and cost.
These challenges are a result of business users lacking the incentive to adequately govern, secure, and budget for applications deployed in the cloud. As a result, IT organizations have looked to replicate public cloud models in order to convince business users to utilize internal private clouds. An internal cloud avoids the challenges of portability, governance, security, and cost that are associated with public clouds. While the increased cost and inflexibility of private clouds may be justified, the challenges public clouds face make it clear that a solution that allows businesses to seamlessly move applications between cloud providers (both public and private) is critical. A hybrid cloud built with heterogeneous technologies allows business users to benefit from flexibility and agility, while IT maintains
governance and control.
With Red Hat CloudForms, businesses no longer have to choose between providing flexibility and agility to end users through the use of cloud computing or maintaining governance and control of their IT assets. Red Hat CloudForms is an open hybrid cloud management platform that delivers the flexibility and agility businesses want with the control and governance that IT requires. Organizations can build a hybrid cloud that encompasses all of their infrastructure using CloudForms and manage cloud applications without vendor lock-in.
CloudForms implements a layer of abstraction on top of cloud resources–private cloud providers, public cloud providers, and virtualization providers. That abstraction is expressed as the ability to partition and organize cloud resources as seemingly independent clouds to which users can deploy and manage AppForms–CloudForms cloud applications. CloudForms achieves these benefits by allowing users to:
• build clouds for controlled agility
• utilize a cloud-centric deployment and management model
• enable policy-based self-service for end users
This document explains how CloudForms meets the challenges that come from letting users serve themselves, while maintaining control of where workloads are executed and ensuring the life cycle is properly managed. IT organizations are able to help their customers better utilize the cloud or virtualization provider that best meets the customer’s needs while solving the challenges of portability, governance, security, and cost.
all things open 