Cloudify vs VMware Cloud Director 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.

VMware Cloud Director, also known as vCloud Director, is a cloud management tool that offers secure, flexible, and efficient cloud resources to thousands of enterprises and IT teams across the world. The solution serves as one of the leading cloud service-delivery platforms for businesses that want to manage and operate their services effectively. By deploying this solution, companies can benefit from virtualized networking, computing, security, and storage. These benefits can be received in a timely manner, as the infrastructure of the product is operationally ready within minutes and clients do not need to install and configure physical infrastructure.

One of the biggest advantages of vCloud Director is that it allows users to build cloud-ready applications. In several ways, it facilitates the process for developers, including:

• Open to DevOps: The product addresses the needs of DevOps teams by providing Infrastructure as Code services with vCD Terraform Provider. This allows developers to deliver infrastructure directly from code. Additionally, it provides capabilities from Python and vCD API as well as Object Storage API and App Launchpad APIs.
  
  
• Customization: This solution is very customizable and extensible for cloud providers to deliver their own branding, themes, and services to their clients.
  
  
• Dev-ready cloud: vCloud Director offers support for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for vSphere and multicloud with a plugin for container service extension. Through these, native K8s Clusters or Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters can be delivered and managed through a user interface (UI) and application programming interface (API).

vCloud Director Features

This VMware product has various features through which users can virtualize their data and benefit from quality management solutions. Among the popular capabilities of vCloud Director are:

• Elastic secure virtual data centers: This vCloud Director feature provides tenants with securely isolated virtual resources, fine-grained control of their public cloud services, and independent role-based authentication.
  
  
• Multi-site management: This feature allows companies to stretch data centers across sites and geographies as well as connect to existing dedicated vCenters for access and management or on-broad into VMware vCloud Director.
  
  
• ISV ecosystem: This feature integrates leading cloud service vendors into the product using an open extensibility framework. Some of the partners of vCloud Director include Dell Data Protection, Veeam, Cloudian, AWS S3, and Dell ECS.
  
  
• DRaaS workload protection: This feature allows users to deliver self-service tiered disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) on-premises to cloud and cloud to cloud.
  
  
• Cloud migration: Part of this feature is the plugin VMware Cloud Director Availability, which enables simple migration to cloud, offering self-service cold or warm migration to users' vCloud Director clouds.
  
  
• Operational visibility and insights: The product includes an accessible dashboard and a single pane of glass to provide centralized multi-tenant cloud management views.
  
  
• Cloud-native applications and development: This feature makes the platform suitable for developers to sandbox or deploy apps as it natively supports Tanzu Basic, native K8s, and PKS.
  
  
• Automation: Through various tools and deep integration, the solution allows users to automate complex infrastructure-as-code and tile UI-driven workflows. This allows them to deploy X-as-a-Service and maintain full access control and visibility at the same time.
  
  
• Application Platform as a Service: This feature enables users to deliver their own catalog-based applications or VMware Cloud Marketplace-certified third-party cloud applications through the plugin App Launchpad VMware Cloud Director.
  
  
• GPU as a Service: Utilizing Nvidia AI Enterprise, this feature provides support for GPU as a Service and delivers multi-tenant GPU services for customers who require high-performance compute for GPU-specific applications.
  
  
• Secure cloud: The solution supports multiple security-centric features to deliver an enterprise-class cloud service, including NSX-T distributed firewalling, workload encryption, and integrated disaster recovery replication.

vCloud Director Benefits

VMware vCloud Director offers various benefits to its users. Some of these include:

• The solution provides a highly efficient self-service model which consists of a virtual data center compute, network, storage, and security.
  
  
• VMware vCloud Director offers its users multi-tenancy infrastructure with deep automation which facilitates their daily tasks.
  
  
• The product is cost-efficient, as it is service-ready on its very first day and offers a high revenue from services.
  
  
• Businesses can deliver services to their clients in a timely manner through this product, benefitting from its natively integrated solutions.
  
  
• VMware vCloud Director provides users with high flexibility, as it allows businesses to stretch networks across virtual data centers globally.
  
  
• The solution provides load-balancing capabilities, which facilitate the creation of new hybrid applications and digital transformation initiatives.

Reviews from Real Users

Ajit Y., a cloud architect at a computer software company, likes VMware vCloud Director because it is a stable, truly multitenant software and the go-to tool for infrastructure as a service.

Kashif F., a divisional engineer at National Telecom Corporatio, rates vCloud Director highly because the product can be used for infrastructure provisioning without using a platform service.