In case you missed it, our annual CloudLIVE conference happened this week—only this time in a virtual format. More than 1,000 people tuned in for a whirlwind 13 hours of content, packed with customer talks, training sessions, demos, product announcements, and a big debate. There was so much going on you might have missed the slew of product news that we announced! Never fear: I’ll break down the top announcements for you here.
The one common thread you’ll see through all these announcements is the focus on helping our largest and most complex customers optimize for cost efficiency, maintain high levels of security, and ensure stable operations in their multicloud environments—even during tumultuous or uncertain times.
To help customers navigate this new reality, CloudHealth is pleased to announce the following enhancements and services:
FlexOrgs General Availability
As enterprises grow and scale in the public cloud, they need a better way to delegate access and drive governance in their cloud management solutions, as well as map these solutions to the way their business is structured. Many organizations form a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to help advise and govern cloud usage through the organization, but often these groups struggle with:
- Continuous increases in scale and complexity. With hundreds of cloud consumers across the distributed enterprise, consuming thousands of different services across multiple clouds and deploying hundreds of changes a day, the scale of cloud operations is beyond the complexity that traditional tools or processes can handle.
- Limited ability to delegate to lines of business. The only way to effectively manage and govern a cloud environment at scale is to delegate management activities to individual teams and lines of business. In this model, the CCoE should remain as the centralized point of control and visibility, while distributed teams perform day-to-day operational management. However, existing solutions don’t map well to increasingly complex organizations.
- Lack contextual data for decision making. In order to enable effective decision making, businesses need to be able to context switch quickly and hone in on the most relevant information, keeping the signal-to-noise ratio as low as possible. In today’s cloud management solutions, it’s challenging to get the right information to the right people at the right time.
To tackle these challenges, we’re delivering a fundamental update to the core platform called FlexOrgs. This new capability enables customers to build CloudHealth organizations that closely reflect their business, providing them with the flexibility they require. With FlexOrgs, you can create and delegate sub-organizations via API up to 10 levels deep, with each sub-organization inheriting permissions from the parent org. Now, every organization can work independently with decentralized management, to get better visibility and conduct their own optimizations, while maintaining centralized visibility and control.
Read more about FlexOrgs in Eric Moakley’s blog here.
Savings Plan Recommendations Public Beta
AWS Savings Plans are emerging as one of the lowest risk options for organizations to reduce their public cloud bills, but especially during times of uncertainty, enterprises are looking for more predictability and enhanced analysis on cost risk benefit before making financial commitments.
Since Savings Plans were first announced, CloudHealth has offered customers Savings Plan reporting and insights. Customers have been able to track and analyze Savings Plan benefits, identify Savings Plan waste, and amortize Savings Plan purchases. Now, we’re adding a new capability that enables customers to compare different Savings Plan recommendations based on their commitment levels or targeted coverage.
With CloudHealth, customers gain access to:
- Trusted recommendations. As an independent and trusted partner, CloudHealth offers third-party validation of potential Savings Plan purchases, foresight into where Savings Plan coverage will apply, and help to make the best decision for your business. Additionally, only CloudHealth can show how potential purchases would apply to your usage so you can understand why the recommendation was made.
- KPI-based scenario modeling. With CloudHealth, customers can conduct their own what-if analysis and understand how different KPIs would be affected by different commitment levels. This is especially important as the Compute Savings Plan construct introduces the inverse relationship between net discount rate, and coverage/savings.
- A simple, flexible, and tunable solution. CloudHealth gives users a side by side comparison of all six Savings Plan purchase options (payment and term) to help you decide which option makes the most sense. CloudHealth also allows you to tune evaluation period, commitment level, and targeted coverage so you can choose the options best suited for your organization.
Read more about Savings Plan Recommendations in Jonathan Morin’s blog here.
API Enhancements
One of the core design tenets of CloudHealth is to make the platform as programmatically accessible as possible—the goal is for every capability in the UI to also be accessible via API.
So far in 2020, we’ve made several key enhancements to our APIs, including updating budget APIs that allow you to query, create, update, and delete budgets, and introducing FlexOrgs APIs that enable you to create and administrate organizational hierarchies, role documents, and user groups. At CloudLIVE we also announced updates to CloudHealth Policy APIs. For years customers have relied on CloudHealth Policies to ensure governance and consistency across distributed teams and clouds.
Today, we’re exposing Policy APIs to customers, enabling them to embed CloudHealth directly into their continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline. These enhancements will help customers drive towards continuous governance of financial management, operations, and security and compliance.
To learn more about the Policy API Updates, read Sowmya Sundararagavan’s blog here.
Enhanced Visibility for Security Teams, Easy API Access, and New Cloud Services Support
VMware Secure State has introduced a major infrastructure enhancement to the VMware Secure State platform to enhance visibility into cloud resources for different security teams and accelerate support for additional cloud services. The Entity Data Service is a new base component of the platform that builds upon our Interconnected Cloud Security Model, exposing advanced query capabilities and optimizing how the service stores cloud configuration data in VMware Secure State.
With the release of the new Entity Data Service, we continue to drive our API first approach. VMware Secure State users can now directly query the Entity Data Service to gain insights they never had before. With the API, users can get configuration details on a specific cloud resource, discover other connected resources, retrieve complete historic configuration changes, and create aggregations queries to understand distributions of different resources in your cloud environment.
Learn more about the latest news from VMware Secure State in Bhanu Agarwal’s blog here.
Azure Modern Commerce Public Beta
Leading Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners such as Ingram Micro and Rackspace rely on CloudHealth to offer managed Azure services. Microsoft announced a new commerce experience for Azure as part of their CSP program called Modern Commerce. We’re pleased to announce that CloudHealth support for Modern Commerce is now in Public Beta for partners. Stay tuned for more as we approach General Availability!
CloudHealth Optimization Desk
We understand that our customers across all industries are working to respond to sudden shifts in market dynamics. To help our customers adapt to this new landscape, we’re offering a free service that highlights top opportunities to optimize your cloud infrastructure as well as how you compare to CloudHealth benchmarks and KPIs.
Learn more about the CloudHealth Optimization Desk in George Hamilton’s blog here.
Learn more
The sessions from CloudLIVE are still available on-demand if you want to dig further into any of these topics, or hear how other customers and partners are using them. You can log into the event platform to view the on-demand replays of CloudLIVE here — available until 9pm EST.
