Cloudify vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) comparison

Cloudify is an open-source orchestration-first cloud management platform. The solution allows applications to efficiently run across multiple cloud or data center platforms for premium multi-cloud infrastructure automation and orchestration. It provides infrastructure automation using environment as a service (EaaS) technology to deploy and continuously manage any cloud, private data center, or Kubernetes service from one central point while leveraging existing toolchains.

Cloudify Product Highlights

• Fully customizable (white label, add, and modify widgets)
• Create a custom view per business units, groups, user role
• Easy integration with any 3rd-party/homegrown portal
• Identify and eliminate task execution failures via a visual interface
• Easy service composition that allows you to create new or update existing services
• Switch between code and topology views
• Import existing automation templates and scripts into Cloudify and automatically convert them into certified environments.
• Intelligent and declarative engine that automates the entire lifecycle management
• Intuitive UX and dashboards allowing complete visibility and control over usage, behavior, faults, and events of application/network services.

Cloudify Features

Cloudify has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Elastic caching
• Post-deployment automation
• Deployment monitoring
• Service catalog
• Real-time code validation
• Plugins (Kubernetes, Ansible, AWS Cloud Formation, Azure ARM, Terraform)
• Advanced Kubernetes management UI
• Multi cluster action
• Governance and compliance
• Self-serve experience

Cloudify Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Cloudify. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Operation agility: Cloudify gives your organization and DevOps teams the ability to react to resource needs, evolve, and adapt quickly over time. 

• Self-service: Cloudify provides a self-service catalog and portal framework for cloud automation and cloud orchestration to provide a helpful and intuitive experience for environments, apps, and services setup and management.

• Real-time visibility: Cloudify enables you to visually track all task executions. By implementing Cloudify, you can monitor progress and status of each execution step on Cloudify’s cloud orchestration platform, identify and eliminate task execution failures via a visual interface, and you can also apply management actions, such as stop, correct, and resume, quickly. 

• Reduce design and configuration time: The Cloudify solution has a visual editor, allowing greater visibility into blueprint structure and dependencies, and drag-n-drop service composition that helps you leverage shared resources and components for ultimate open-source infrastructure and cloud orchestration.

• Fast deployment: Another benefit of Cloudify is that it helps speed up deployments of your test/dev/production environments from your CI/CD.

• Enables continuous updates: With Cloudify, you have continuous updates for your production environments. Cloudify enables your organization to monitor health, heal failures, update patches, and scale resources without any environment downtime.

• Governance: By using the Cloudify solution, you can accommodate governance changes and can scale and update operations according to your certified architecture. 

• Easier to manage Kubernetes: Cloudify makes it simple for you to manage multi Kubernetes clusters via service orchestration, enabling you to manage the application service itself rather than just its infrastructure. 

• Cost optimization: With Cloudify, you can control costs by employing end-to-end modeling of the entire infrastructure. The solution offers cost-saving policies, which include the decommissioning of formerly complex services and resources.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is a cloud management tool that drives consistent governance across private and public clouds for its users. The solution brings simplicity and ease of use to managing and building cloud deployments by providing a unified multicloud management that addresses common cloud adoption challenges.

Nutanix Cloud Manager offers four key value drivers:

• Intelligent operations: They include monitoring, insights, and automated remediation.
  
  
• Self-service and orchestration: This capacity category of the product includes tools for managing application and infrastructure workloads across multicloud environments.
  
  
• Cost governance: NCM offers cost governance through accurate visibility into public and private cloud metering, cost optimization, and chargeback.
  
  
• Security central: The solution facilitates users' security operations through alert automations with intelligent analysis and compliance controls.

Nutanix Cloud Manager provides coverage for Nutanix private clouds as well as for VMware's. The solution also supports several popular public cloud providers, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). NCM provides additional flexibility for users, as it is also available as a fully managed Software as a Service (SaaS). This product allows companies to benefit from all of Nutanix multicloud self-services, application automation, security compliance, and governance, without depending on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Features

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has features in the four key categories already mentioned. Some of the main capacities of the solution include:

• Codeless task automation: This Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) feature allows IT teams to build automation and improve productivity with zero coding required.
  
  
• Automated optimization: This feature detects the performance of VM deviates and raises an anomaly alert automatically without the need for configuration.
  
  
• Capacity usage and scenario analysis: This feature’s runways enable pay-as-you-grow scaling and improves capacity usage with optimizations.
  
  
• Self-service provisioning: This feature allows users to publish blueprints directly to end users through Nutanix Marketplace.
  
  
• Application lifecycle management: Through this NCM feature, users can provision, configure, scale, upgrade, and delete applications across cloud environments as well as provide access to multiple teams at a time.
  
  
• Hybrid multicloud orchestration: This Nutanix Cloud Manager feature allows users to automate the provisioning of hybrid cloud architectures from a single control plane.
  
  
• Showback, chargeback, and budgeting: Nutanix Cloud Manager uses this feature to allow users to automatically create cloud consumption reports, define chargeback policies, and set up budget alerts.
  
  
• Automated right-sizing and intelligent purchases: Through leveraging machine learning (ML) algorithms, users can benefit from the automatic detection of anomalous spending patterns.
  
  
• Security monitoring and remediation: This feature of Nutanix Cloud Manager allows users to utilize over 250 audits for public clouds and over 500 for Nutanix on-premises.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Benefits

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) provides its users with several benefits. These include:

• Nutanix Cloud Manager offers intelligent operations through the automation of operational tasks.
  
  
• NCM gives users self-service opportunities and centralized role-based IT governance, which allows them the freedom to control their processes better.
  
  
• Companies can benefit from cost and security governance with intelligent analysis and regulatory compliance.
  
  
• The product has been made available across all regions in 2022, allowing worldwide access to its services without limitations.
  
  
• NCM is suitable for beginners, as it offers low to no code actions.
  
  
• Nutanix Cloud Manager provides real-time security, ensuring the cloud data of companies is protected at all times.

Reviews from Real Users

An IT Operations at an energy/utilities company likes Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) because the product provides visibility, simplifies operations, and saves time and cost.

Drew P., a network systems administrator at Moda Health, rates NCM highly because the product saves man-hours with excellent speed on outcomes and provides a continuous validation process.