Cloudify’s 5.1 release adds integrations to allow it to be an ‘orchestrator of orchestrators for all cloud environments, and also adds DevOps integrations for those environments.

Cloudify is announcing the 5.1 release of its leading Service Orchestration and Automation Platform. This is a major release for the company, which adds many integrations, consistent with its mission of being an ‘orchestrator of orchestrators’ which can manage the many enterprise automation and orchestration solutions which are found in hybrid clouds.

Cloudify is an Israeli-based startup which is a spinoff of in-memory computing platform provider GigaSpaces.

“Our founder is the founder of GigaSpaces, and he decided that it no longer made sense for what we do to be a product in GigaSpaces, so we were spun into a new startup,” said Ariel Dan, Cloudify’s CEO.

Cloudify makes an enterprise automation and orchestration solution – as do many other vendors. Dan said that there is a lot of differentiation in Cloudify’s solution however, particularly their ability to be an ‘orchestrator of orchestrators’.

“There’s a lot of infrastructure complexity out there, and Cloudify provides a very elegant type of solution that is different from the others in the market,” he stated. “There are so many, including HashiCorp’s Terraform, and Red Hat’s Ansible, and each public cloud has its own automation tools. This large number of tools is the biggest issue the enterprise is facing today. The vast majority of enterprises has over ten automation tools, and now they need to control the messy middle for the hybrid environment.”

Dan said that Cloudify is able to address the messy middle because they can work with all of these tools and bring them all together to be managed through a single pane of glass.

“We are an ‘orchestrator of orchestrators,’” he stressed. “This is how a small startup can penetrate this dense market, and ease organizations’ cloud migration transition. We integrate with all those tools. We aren’t selling ourselves as THE technology for companies to solve all their problems. They don’t have to ‘rip and replace.’ That gives them a very short time to value by letting them leverage their existing investments.”

Being able to orchestrate everyone else also prevents Cloudify from getting into an unwinnable features race with much larger companies.

“We don’t want to chase our own tail trying to bring every new AWS feature into our automation,” Dan said. “This open approach helps make us be an enabler. By design, we support both private and public technologies. Customer feedback has indicated that the pandemic has made hybrid cloud the reality for the foreseeable future, because they now see the migration time to public cloud as being 10-15 years rather than 2-3, and we provide the tool to manage that.”

Dan said that Cloudify has multiple channel opportunities, including the classic integrator/reseller approach for the enterprise.

The new Cloudify 5.1 release marks what the company calls the rise of a new generation of the Cloudify platform, which aims to simplify the transition of enterprises into cloud-native and public cloud across on-premises, multi-cloud and edge environments. The most important new element is the expansion of the tools with which they integrate.

“With 5.1, we now have integration with almost every major automation tool,” Dan said. This latest release includes out-of-the-box integrations with many Kubernetes clusters (GKE, EKS, AKS, OpenShift and Kubespray), with CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitActions, and CircleCI), and with automation tools, including AWS Cloud Formation, Azure ARM, Ansible, and Terraform.

“With 5.1, we now have all the integrations which businesses should expect,” Dan said. “The integrating with Jenkins and GitOps will also simplify the user experience for DevOps.”

Another major capability is the improvement of their service composition DSL, which lets users turn existing templates into high level reusable environments, each serving multiple applications that share similar configurations.

“This is a major enhancement of our DSL,” Dan said. It allows tasks to be deployed in hours rather than weeks, alongside cost-saving policies such as decommissioning of complex services and resources.

Other enhancements include improvements to the UI, and workload processing.

Dan said that some exciting things are on the roadmap.

“While we provide a marketplace of automations integrated into Cloudify, we will have a fully featured as-a-service offering that will allow DevOps to run without having to deploy on-prem,” he indicated.

While today, Cloudify is sold into very large enterprises who have the most complex environments, over time, Dan expects what Cloudify does will have more value downmarket.

“Today, the sweet spot is large enterprises, because of complexity, but once the market is mature, we expect that these problems will scale down to the midmarket and even to some smaller organizations,” he said. “Our aim is to align our roadmap with those market trends.”