Cloudify this week announced a free user interface (UI) module that expands its infrastructure provisioning platform and allows DevOps professionals to integrate unlimited Terraform modules.
Nati Shalom, Cloudify CTO, said the Terraform UI provides a familiar construct for DevOps teams using the open source DevOps automation platform to provide infrastructure-as-code (IaC). The module allows DevOps professionals to seamlessly import Terraform modules into Cloudify without writing blueprints or any additional glue code, he said.
Cloudify now automatically generates the wrapper needed for each Terraform template to allow DevOps teams to work together to manage secrets, perform simultaneous deployments, store states remotely and monitor deployments, users and versions through any Git repository. Those Terraform modules can be integrated into application programming interfaces (APIs) and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms as required by DevOps teams.
DevOps teams can also import existing automation modules and scripts into Cloudify. Those modules and scripts can be automatically converted to environments that can be centrally managed via the Cloudify console or by exporting to ServiceNow’s IT service management (ITSM) platform as a software-as-a. -service (SaaS) application.
That approach provides the added benefit of enabling DevOps teams to centrally manage all modules and versions of Terraform through a single console as part of an effort to reduce misconfigures that lead to security breaches. , he added.
Cloudify allows DevOps teams to create a self-service catalog and portal where the infrastructure can be managed. Many DevOps teams have developed their own portals to manage this process. However, Shalom said those DevOps teams will need to allocate resources to maintaining that portal when those resources can be allocated to other critical tasks.
DevOps teams can’t just use Cloudify to apply patches, change topologies, add security features, make configuration changes or make additional resources available, Shalom added, it can now they also integrate Terraform tooling into platforms such as Kubernetes or other automation frameworks such as Ansible. Cloudify also makes available an enterprise-grade version of the platform with these integrations along with high usability and support for up to 150 environments.
It is not clear how much time and effort IT organizations devote to developing and maintaining DevOps environments. In many cases, however, it is likely that organizations will have to revisit decisions about developing capabilities that, at the time, were not yet available. That doesn’t mean that replacing custom tools in DevOps makes sense overall, but it’s likely that, in the coming years, the range of tooling made available through DevOps platforms will greatly expand. Relatives newcomers to DevOps, meanwhile, enjoy the benefit of platforms they don’t have to create themselves.
In fact, Shalom said that, in terms of DevOps adoption, an inflection point has been reached as more organizations are launching digital business transformation initiatives that require applications to be built and deployed faster than data. The challenge, of course, is enabling that to happen safely and at a reasonable cost.