Today’s forward-thinking organizations have discovered that the cloud is not just a critical enabler but also a key accelerator of digital transformation, with its ability to increase agility and innovation, reduce IT overhead, and shift data management needs at scale.
While there is no single route to the cloud, the vast majority of organizations are learning that taking the hybrid cloud approach allows them to capitalize on the benefits of both public and private clouds. Hybrid cloud has become highly appealing because it offers businesses more architectural flexibility, better security, more technical control, and technical predictability.
Nevertheless, hybrid cloud is now without its own risks. To reap the long-promised benefits of the cloud, it’s imperative for businesses to take advantage of the right hybrid cloud management tools. Without the right tools to manage hybrid cloud resources, it’s impossible to understand what resources live in which clouds, scale up and down based on demand, manage cost and the transfer workloads to different environments if something goes wrong.
SourceForge had the opportunity to connect with Jesse Stockall, CTO at Embotics, to discuss the evolution of cloud services and the popularity of the hybrid cloud model. Stockall also talked about the Embotics vCommander 7, the industry’s first true next generation cloud management platform, and how it helps to bridge the gap between traditional IT and fast-moving DevOps teams.
Q: Please share with our readers a brief overview on Embotics. What is your company’s mission and vision, and what types of organizations do you currently serve?
Jesse Stockall, CTO at Embotics
A: Embotics is a cloud automation company for IT organizations and service providers, aimed at bridging the gap between traditional IT concerns such as governance, compliance and policy-based management with the speed and agility needed by DevOps-based engineering teams.
Embotics helps organizations meet the multi-environment integration challenge head-on through its flagship product, Embotics vCommander. With vCommander, a next-generation cloud management platform, Embotics is able to deliver unparalleled orchestration, automation, cost optimization and end-user self-service capabilities across on-premise, cloud and containers to get applications and services to market fast.
Embotics prides itself on delivering a premier user experience and unmatched customer support. Its vCommander platform is used by hundreds of organizations across a range of industries including Nordstrom, NASA, Fanatics, Informatica, Flexential and more.
Q: Talk to our readers about the advancement and evolution of cloud services in recent years. Why are enterprises moving to the cloud at an unprecedented pace?
A: For decades, the only organizations that had true IT functions were the ones that could afford the infrastructure and manpower costs of building their own data centers – either on or off-premise. While the cloud has evolved immensely over the years, the benefits it promised have remained consistent from day one – increased efficiency, cost savings, workload scalability and speed.
With the cloud, businesses both large and small could compete in their respective markets. Today, a new company could buy cloud resources, like AWS, and realistically be up and running in the cloud in a single day. But the sheer proliferation of the cloud, through trends like shadow IT, has gotten us to where we are today.
Q: Hybrid cloud is the new reality, but building and effectively managing multiple environments presents a host of challenges. What essential concepts do companies need to understand when embracing a hybrid cloud strategy and what should they look for in a hybrid cloud management platform?
A: The cloud holds the promise of some very real business benefits. But without the right tools, those benefits are very rarely realized. From Embotics’ perspective, there are a few things organizations should consider when embracing a hybrid cloud strategy, including:
- Understanding complexity – the old way of managing complex cloud environments focused on IT efficiency and control. But today’s organizations face an unprecedented level of complexity to cloud management based on the evolving needs of businesses in the era of DevOps, microservices and containers. Organizations need a cloud management platform that can harmonize all aspects of a hybrid cloud strategy.
- Managing costs – managing cloud costs is nearly impossible without visibility. When considering a cloud management platform, it should include capabilities such as expense management, cost optimization and governance, through features like cost analytics and automated rightsizing, to provide the depth needed to gain true private and public cloud cost visibility.
- Focusing on automation – every successful hybrid cloud strategy includes a certain level of automation. With automation, organizations can optimize resources in real-time – such as shifting workloads – as well as scale as needed. For example, a retail organization can automatically increase resources before Black Friday and reduce them again post-holiday activity, ensuring operations (and costs) run smoothly.
Q: Embotics recently released a survey with Ponemon Institute. A key finding in the report is that the vast majority of organizations lack visibility into their cloud environment. Why do you think is this so? What are some possible repercussions of this lack of visibility and control?
A: The proliferation of cloud services has helped enterprises reduce costs and become more efficient, but that’s not without some challenges. Our survey with Ponemon Institute found that organizations are struggling with the way employees consume cloud resources – or the shadow IT trend I mentioned earlier.
In fact, 46 percent of respondents said that their organization’s cloud consumption model is “cloud direct,” where end users bypass IT and cloud management technologies to communicate directly to the clouds in question (e.g. AWS or Azure) through native APIs or their own public cloud accounts. This type of cloud-direct consumption has created an extremely complex cloud environment, one that is difficult to gain visibility into.
And our survey proves this: 70 percent of respondents have no visibility into the purpose or ownership of the virtual machines in their cloud environment; 68 percent of respondents lack a single user interface to view their entire cloud environment; and 66 percent of respondents said they are constantly challenged with management and tracking of digital and virtual assets in their cloud ecosystem.
One of the main repercussions we’ve seen – besides some of the cost and optimization challenges I’ve mentioned before – is risk. According to the survey, 57 percent of respondents believe users are increasing business risk by violating policies about where digital assets can reside.
Q: Tell us a bit more about your solution. How does Embotics help organizations combat the challenges in the cloud market and embrace the potential of DevOps?
A: Today’s organizations are operating in an app-centric world. With the implementation of microservices and containers, there are more moving parts than ever before for IT teams to manage. Further, today’s developers simply don’t want to adopt traditional IT solutions and policies, including cloud management, as it often requires manual processes that make DevOps less agile. Embotics vCommander helps deliver the desired speed under the required control, satisfying both IT and DevOps with one, simple platform.
vCommander provides Containers as a Service (CaaS) capabilities to help developers bypass the otherwise daunting installation process. With vCommander, organizations can easily manage Kubernetes clusters through a single pane of glass, providing inventory and discovery of the clusters, as well as self-service provisioning of new shared or dedicated sandbox environments. The product’s all-in-one interface is a contrast to other solutions that require multiple products to accomplish the same task.
Overall, Embotics vCommander offers the fastest time to value in cloud automation. It can be installed in minutes – not days or weeks – and does not require an expensive professional services engagement.
Q: The company recently unveiled vCommander 7. What’s new in the latest version?
A: Global 1000 organizations continue to move toward cloud native strategies, yet are still using IaaS for their traditional apps. It’s critical that organizations have the ability to manage both.
vCommander 7 is the industry’s first true next generation cloud management platform, purposed designed for designed for microservices, containers, DevOps and hybrid IT. For organizations, this means being able to reduce the complexity and friction associated with all of these technologies.
In particular in the newest version, vCommander 7 delivers: provisioning, automation and orchestration of infrastructure and virtual machines; significant DevOps enablement via customizable, modular workflows that seamlessly and bi-directionally integrate with popular CI/CD pipeline tools along with flexible Sandbox and test environment provisioning; governance and policy compliance for security, network policy and configuration; rich hybrid cloud expense management and optimization, as well as orchestrated remediation; and support for both cloud-direct and cloud-brokered consumption models.
Q: How does the vCommander platform stand out in the market? What problems does it seek to solve?
A: The cloud automation market has seen some significant consolidation over the past few years, meaning organizations are often faced with implementing patch-work solutions from large vendors. And lifetime support of the solution is often limited. Embotics recognizes that today’s organizations are faced with complex cloud environments, and many struggle to achieve the flexibility and efficiency that technologies – like cloud, microservices and DevOps – offer. vCommander is the only solution in the market that is purpose built to bridge the gap between traditional IT and fast-moving DevOps teams, and vCommander stands out in the market by offering:
- Support for Kubernetes Container Management: vCommander’s real-time inventory and workflow orchestration feature enables organizations to easily provision, clone and manage Kubernetes clusters.
DevOps and Workflow Orchestration: vCommander 7 provides a wide range of DevOps and Workflow enhancements to assist automation needs and related integration to third-party systems or CI/CD pipelines. - Multi-Cloud Catalog and Intelligent Placement: This release introduces a canonical-form, multi-cloud catalog along with several Intelligent Placement features and policies, ensuring workloads are provisioned to the optimal cloud based on business priorities including resource consumption, cost, placement attributes and per-destination quotas.
- Cloud Expense Management: vCommander now provides significant additional depth in both private and public cloud cost visibility, providing the data users require to make informed cloud cost decisions and provides a new cost analytics dashboard for both cloud administrators and delegated business unit users.
- Cost Optimization and Cloud Governance: Leverage cost visibility and provide immediate and ongoing savings in a controlled fashion with vCommander’s enhanced policy automation and analytics. vCommander now provides automated rightsizing, executing on its recommendations and providing controlled remediation.
Q: Where do you see the hybrid cloud market going in the future? What emerging trends or technologies do you think will affect and shape the industry?
A: I think it’s safe to say we’re never going back on hybrid cloud. Organizations have fully realized that it doesn’t make sense to go all in on one cloud. By limiting themselves to one cloud solution, organizations, for example, lose the ability to migrate applications or workloads to other clouds.
Further, IT has long been trained in a static environment. But as developers start to drive a large majority of cloud usage within organizations, IT needs to be able to accommodate the speed and agility of DevOps. Legacy IT isn’t going away, so they need tools that can deliver IT control without impeding DevOps.
This will give way to other initiatives, like DevSecOps. The cloud is elastic, and it needs to be able to scale. Unfortunately, traditional security strategies cannot scale. Security has to be baked into the process, and tool vendors need to be able to offer security value through cloud brokerage and direct to the cloud.
Q: Are you brewing up any new developments or product offerings that customers should look forward to?
A: Embotics plans to leverage the new extension capabilities in vCommander 7 to deliver workflow scenarios, integrations and reports independent of the main product releases.
About Embotics
Embotics harmonizes digital business processes for Global 1000 enterprises to accelerate the speed and agility of their developers while ensuring governance and control for IT. The company’s hybrid cloud management platform delivers unparalleled orchestration, automation, cost optimization and end-user self-service capabilities across on-premise, cloud, and containers to get applications and services to market fast. Embotics vCommander is used by organizations including Nordstrom, NASA, Fanatics, Informatica and Flexential.