Cloud Management Solutions -- New Reviews Q1 2017

What do users discuss in their cloud management reviews from Q1 2017?

What have their experiences been so far this year?

In the excerpts below, users discuss valuable features and room for improvement among the following solutions:

• SaltStack
• CloudBolt
• Cloudify
• Stratoscale
• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control
• VMware vRealize Suite 

Continue reading to read the latest cloud management feedback from real users.

SaltStack

Valuable Features

Sergei Senko, Senior System Engineer at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees, lists several of SaltStack’s valuable features:

• Simple and flexible YAML/JSON configuration management framework which allows simultaneous configuration of thousands of systems.

• “Reactor" for event-driven infrastructure which must be present in any cloud based solutions and in CloudOps itself.

• Powerful and flexible DevOps orchestration solution.

Room for Improvement

Ashutosh Narayan, Senior Consultant at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees, suggests the following areas for improvement:

• It doesn't have a GUI to manage VMs.

• Some Python modules had issues which I think will be fixed in newer versions.

• Other configuration management tools, like Chef and Puppet, have a web interface to perform certain tasks on instances where an application is deployed.

• We can scale and schedule based on traffic. If you want to recreate/add a new instance, you can immediately do it from web interface. This was missing on earlier versions we tried.

CloudBolt

Organizational Improvements

“We were able to collapse over 95% of our orchestration directly into Chef and CloudBolt as opposed to having well over 300+ steps of orchestration in vCO and multiple scripts to call out to other self developed API's to do that same thing”, shares Sean Davis, Technical Advisor at a hospitality company with 1,0001-5,000 employees.

Davis elaborates:

“Our delivery of VM's went from 19-23 minutes to 8-13 minutes depending on the cloud. The willingness of the CloudBolt team to improve their product at a very rapid pace has resulted in a delivery of over 130+ RFE's in less than 6 months to enhance the compatibility with company services, functionality and aesthetics.”

Room for Improvement

Karlos Knox, Product Manager at a media company with 1,000-5,000 employees, suggests improving “support for Active Directory groups”.

Knox explains:

“Currently, user management in CloudBolt groups is managed individually. We had a previous access model that was based on AD groups, and allowed users to be able to use the product with their group membership, so no users were ever added directly to the provisioning system.”  

Cloudify

Valuable Features

Peter Meulbroek, Partner, Cloud services at a tech services company, describes Cloudify’s key capabilities:

“Cloudify is an application that allows users to control the full lifecycle of distributed applications.

Based on TOSCA – an open specification for defining an application's topology, lifecycle workflows and lifecycle events – Cloudify can manage complex, distributed applications across both public and private clouds (multi-cloud and hybrid), including containerized applications and SDN.”

Room for Improvement

“We like the current roadmap, which is evolving Cloudify into the cloud management platform space”, writes Sam Melehy, CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees.  

“We'd like to see the maturity of the plugins continue, including Amazon EMR and others.”

Stratoscale

Organizational Improvements

Nir Ashkenazi, Global VP Technology & President at a tech services company with 51-200

“We use Stratoscale to allow our end customers and our integrators to manage their own servers and their own product. We're allowing them a great deal of flexibility in terms of how they utilize the cloud. We're making the cloud a lot closer to them, rather than having only six locations like Amazon does.”

Room for Improvements

Ashkenazi then suggests future additions that could improve Stratoscale:

“We've been working with the product for so long, we've actually been very satisfied. But they could integrate more products. They recently purchased a DB-as-a-service provider, which is something we've been expecting.”

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control

Valuable Features

Oracle DBA at an aerospace/defense firm, Felix Noble Abu, writes:

“The performance feature is most valuable to me. It allows the user to see the real-time behavior of the database and diagnose where an issue may exist. It also has advisor functions that give recommendations on what to do to fix any problems with performance of the database.”

Room for Improvement

A Database Administrator at a recruiting/HR firm shares:

“I think the help file should include more in-depth documents for the user to collaborate with all aspects of the product even if they haven't had product training.”

VMware vRealize Suite

Valuable Features

Adrian Marc Creek, SSIO Infrastructure Engineer at Wyndham Destination Network -- RCI Europe describes:

“I have been using Operations Manager for the last few months since reviewing my licence structure and procuring the Enterprise Plus, management bundle.

Having a number of distributed vSphere environments spread across the UK and Europe has presented a number of challenges in terms of centralised alerting and reporting. With my collections all configured I am now able to receive invaluable information quickly - reducing the labour that was previously causing issues.”

Room for Improvement

“It lacks the expected seamless integration with vCenter”, writes Karlos Knox.

“Objects like templates, storage clusters, or naming changes were not automatically reconciled by vCAC. This often led to full error logs when the only issue was a lack of syncing between vCenter and vCAC.”

Read more of the latest Cloud Management reviews from 2017.