Hybrid Cloud Support with Amazon Web Services

Shashi Kiran, CMO, Quali

Product Announcement

We announced the general availability of CloudShell 7.1, which introduces application deployment for hybrid clouds with support for Amazon Web Services (AWS), among other technical advances. We did this out of our recognition that the rapid adoption of hybrid cloud deployments demanded enablement of hybrid sandboxes that straddle public-private clouds to accelerate cloud adoption with lower risk and increased quality.

Quali CloudShell platform

The Quali CloudShell platform automates and accelerates the DevOps lifecycle by providing dev, test, QA and compliance teams with personal replicas of their production environments within software sandboxes. The latest CloudShell 7.1 release includes out-of-the-box support for AWS via the Quali community along with existing support for VMware vCenter, and Docker. Support for Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform are planned for future releases.

The CloudShell Release 7.1 also allows the management of AWS EC2 instances directly via the same sandbox environment as on premise VM instances. To facilitate an organization’s AWS budget and cost management activities, AWS EC2 instances deployed via CloudShell Apps are preconfigured by design and tagged. This helps drive better governance and cost control.

Latest Opinions from Industry Experts

William Fellows, the VP of Research and Founder of the 451 Research Group has noted that as enterprises shift to a ‘cloud-first’ model, one of the biggest challenges is in bridging the operating models of old world IT with the new. Companies that want to do cloud must embrace DevOps. Quali’s Hybrid cloud sandboxes with public cloud support for providers like Amazon Web Services can be a very powerful tool to accelerate cloud adoption with reduced risk and lower cost. It’s a DevOps-friendly way to reduce hybrid cloud speed bumps.

  The Quali CloudShell platform automates and accelerates the DevOps lifecycle by providing dev, test, QA and compliance teams with personal replicas of their production environments 

Customer’s Reaction

John Jones, a DevOps and IT architect at Cisco has noted considerable value in having consistent DevOps processes across private and public clouds. The ability to spin up sandboxes for Hybrid cloud deployments with standardized environments and end-to-end visibility can allow development and test teams to make the best use of on-premise and public cloud resources, simplify workflows and rollout releases faster with higher quality and reduced risk.

Quali’s Motivation

Quali recognized that more enterprise computing were migrating to public clouds and hybrid clouds, so this 7.1 release reflects the critical nature of hybrid sandbox software for the most complex infrastructure environments that now bridge private datacenters to public clouds and hybrid clouds.  Integrating AWS deployment paths to CloudShell will greatly benefit our enterprise customers increasing the pace of cloud adoption with better governance mechanisms, while reducing cost and enhancing quality. Enterprise IT and DevOps teams should definitely evaluate Quali first for these complex Dev/Test environments”.

Easy to Use Product

Environment sandbox templates consist of a pre-defined set of components (such as resources, connections, inputs, properties etc.). These enable enterprises to define a uniform standard for new environments. The CloudShell Sandbox Template is provided off-the-shelf with CloudShell. It is configured to run CloudShell’s Setup and Teardown processes that perform the following important operations:

• Deploy and de-provision apps from the CloudShell and the cloud provider
• Enable the use of AWS EC2 Apps by running connectivity procedures that set up the AWS VPC and subnet for the reservation
• Link connectivity routes between resources and/or apps

In addition, users can now easily add custom data from Sandboxes into the CloudShell Insight business intelligence (BI) module and immediately expose them for use in dashboards, without any programming.

Tools other than SaaS solutions

For on-premise data center or VMware vCenter-based private cloud deployments, the Quali Developer Community provides open standards for Shells, which are the building blocks for sandboxes. The new Shell standards make it easy for developers to create and share Shells within the developer community and open source them. The latest standards include updates to the Network Shell, along with standards for new Shells including Basic Shells, Firewall, Traffic, Power Distribution Units (PDU), and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Shells. Advanced VLAN features in CloudShell 7.1 make it easier for developers to connect virtual and physical endpoints for on-premise VMware vCenter deployments.

Quali’s upcoming Projects

Quali will host an upcoming Webinar on Nov. 2 about moving datacenter workloads to hybrid clouds and public clouds. Quali CTO Joan Wrabetz and CMO Shashi Kiran will discuss how cloud sandboxes can speed up application roll-outs and make hybrid cloud deployments more successful. Webinar attendees will also receive a free ebook, Introduction to DevOps.