RightScale’s Single Pane of Glass for Multi-cloud Management

When working at scale, the amount of information developers have to manage can be overwhelming. This is even more of a challenge for developers working with applications spanning across multiple clouds. As a result of the ever-increasing cloud-sprawl, administrators often pine for a “single pane of glass.”

The concept behind a “single pane of glass” is simple. In essence, it just means the administrator would like to have a single control point to manage their applications across clouds. Whether these are bare-metal, public, hybrid, or private clouds, deploying applications at scale shouldn’t have to come at the cost of running ten individual cloud providers.

One Glass Pane to Rule them All

RightScale aims to simplify how businesses handle their cloud platforms, through a set of integrated services — including those for multiple-cloud self-service, cloud governance, cost tracking and continuous delivery — all under a single console.

For instance, pricing data is key to choosing the right cloud solution, and hidden costs to on-boarding a cloud platform can quickly result in lost revenue or shocking overages. When one considers how much data is not utilized within a traditional storage solution, this can be a costly mistake.

RightScale introduced its Cloud Pricing Service in 2015, which moved to general availability earlier in March of 2016. This Cloud Pricing Service dovetails well with its Cloud Comparison Tool, allowing users to compare and contrast popular cloud providers based not only on their features but their price points.

RightScale: Cloud comparison dashboard

Enterprise IT teams are ever increasingly acting as cloud service brokers. By providing pre-configured templates to developers and internal customers, RightScale aims to automate provisioning and operations — Thus allowing these teams to focus on the work that matters to them. “Operations teams can have visibility, governance, and cost controls across all their clouds and all their cloud-based workloads,” said Kim Weins, vice president of marketing at RightScale.

RightScale is not alone in this market. Both Google and Microsoft are developing tools for multi-cloud management.

Scalr offers its users full-scale cloud-platform management along with the ability to also enforce security and governance policies.  CloudBolt is another offering in this space which creates opportunities for IT professionals to automate and provision their services. By implementing automated provisioning, IT professionals are better able to create external environments for testing and deployment.

Developers often want to implement custom workflows for cloud management. RightScale offers this alongside analytics and management tools which will benefit them across all stages of development. Those running applications at scale now require their cloud provider to offer integration for a variety of APIs and CI/CD [Continuous integration/Continuous deployment] pipelines.

With applications building and deploying code hundred or even thousands of times a day in a CI/CD workflow, RightScale provides developers with the orchestration and provisioning tools to scale their infrastructure with ease.

Behind the Scenes

Under the hood, RightScale uses some of the most popular programming languages to power its SaaS platform. “We primarily use Ruby for our application code but have recently started using Go for some of our services and components. We are using Go in our RightLink agent as well as for our CLI,” said Weins.

RightScale: Cloud Analytics API Dashboard

Users can also add RightScale to their existing workloads, enabling them to start managing their current cloud without going through a complicated setup process. Adding the RightScale agent to one’s workload provides monitoring, alerting, and scripting functionalities alongside additional benefits.

In particular, these include a template for orchestrating new cloud-based apps and server configuration. Developers employing these templates can also leverage the power of their existing configuration tools such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, or custom scripts. For those working with containers, RightScale also allows developers to package their code into containers for cloud-ready deployment.

If managing your cloud sprawl has become overwhelming, RightScale offers a simplified solution which hopes to address many of the common pitfalls that can befall enterprises working at scale today.

Feature image via Pixabay, embedded images via RightScale.