CloudBolt also announces new integrations for IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud for Government, VMware Cloud on AWS, and Red Hat OpenShift in their 9.2 software release.

Today, cloud management platform provider CloudBolt Software is announcing the general availability of their CloudBolt 9.2 version. The biggest news is that they have extended their support for Kubernetes, but they have also deepened their support for Terraform, and announced new integrations for IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud for Government, VMware Cloud on AWS, and Red Hat OpenShift.

CloudBolt was founded in 2012, and is headquartered in the Washington D.C. area, with over 80 employees. They received 23 million in Series A funding from Insight Partners in the summer of 2018, and have been showing strong growth, with 150% in 2018 and 50% in 2019.

“As industry turns to containers and hybrid cloud, IT operations wants better control of those cloud environments,” said Grant Ho, CloudBolt’s Chief Marketing Officer. “We go after enterprise customers, improving the environment for both IT operations and developers. The CloudBolt platform brings agility for developers while allowing IT to control the resources. We help provision and orchestrate from IT to developer groups, and help them consume quickly and easily.”

Ho provided a couple examples of specifically what they do.

“Home Depot had a pain point around provisioning, where it would take them two to three weeks to deploy virtual machines to developers,” he said. “We brought that down to ten minutes. A large drugstore chain had 20,000 VMs, where we put in power schedules to turn them off when they needed to be off, saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

CloudBolt provides access to a large assortment of private and public clouds.

“We have one-click connects to over 20 cloud environments, including VMware, Nutanix, and Alibaba,” Ho said.

CloudBolt has multiple types of competition.

“VMware VRealize Automation [vRA] is the big one, and there are smaller vendors like Morpheus,” Ho said. “What amounts to the third type of competition are companies who still do all of this with manual processes.”

The company has a hybrid channel model, but Ho said that they are very channel friendly.

“We have a direct sales team, but last year we grew our channel partner base by 100%, and also last year launched our Global Partner Connect program.”

The new 9.2 release emphasizes what Ho termed unparalleled Kubernetes support and a very strong Terraform integration.

“Everyone is going towards containers,” he said. “Today it’s about 25-30% in the enterprise, but Gartner projects that it will be 75% by 2023. With this release, we are introducing advanced multimode Kubernetes management.”

Ho said that multimode Kubernetes deployments are still a painful process.

“We allow developers one or two click access to deploy complex multi-node Kubernetes clusters – and easily deploy containerized apps into them,” he said. “They can also be decommissioned at the same speed. We are the only multi-node Kubernetes management people at this point, through our blueprinting technology. It abstracts away complexity and allow developers to code with as few questions as possible.”

Terraform facilitates infrastructure as code, and it is now supported through a new third-party plug-in in GitHub.

“Infrastructure as code gives developers access to their underlying IaaS as quickly as possible,” Ho said. “Our Terraform support gives developers the flexibility to import into CloudBolt and execute Infrastructure as Code through CloudBolt to automate infrastructure management. In 9.2 developers using Terraform can make API calls into CloudBolt to provision resources, doing it under CloudBolt management for better governance.”

The 9.2 release also provides new CloudBolt integrations for IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud for Government, VMware Cloud on AWS, and Red Hat OpenShift.

“The story there is that in supporting additional cloud environments, we continue to expand,” Ho said. “We think of ourselves as the ‘easiest to extend’ cloud management platform. But while we have dozens of integrations, we also have many that we don’t yet integrate with them. We do have a simple plug-in infrastructure to write Python Code and easily bolt on third parties into CloudBolt.”

CloudBolt 9.2 is generally available now.