Everybody by now has some understanding that cloud computing is fundamentally changing the way IT is built, deployed and managed; they’re just not exactly sure how.
Engine Yard this week gave IT organizations a good glimpse into what that future may be like with the unveiling of a new architecture that will be used to power Engine Yard Cloud.
According to Carston Puls, vice president of product management for Engine Yard, the whole concept is to allow IT organizations to manage the entire hybrid cloud computing environment via an application programming interface.
Instead of being able to deploy the Engine Yard platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering on a single cloud, the new architecture makes it possible to federate the management of hybrid cloud computing environments across private clouds and public cloud services from Amazon and Verizon Terremark.
That capability, says Puls, paves the way for IT organizations to start optimizing the deployment of workloads independently of the underlying infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) technology being used.
At the other end of the stack, Engine Yard is deploying a new management framework that gives IT organizations more granular control of the overall IT environment via a common API. What makes Engine Yard different, says Puls, is that it gives the IT organization maximum control over the environment versus forcing them to conform to the policies and procedures defined by a PaaS provider that only allows its service on a cloud platform it manages.
On a certain level, a PaaS environment is really just the substantiation of a Web application server in the cloud. The idea is to mask the complexity of the underlying environment from the developer. PaaS takes that concept and applies it to a set of cloud resources. Engine Yard is now applying that concept to a global set of federated cloud resources that are highly distributed.
At the moment, hybrid cloud computing is an overly complex endeavor. But as PaaS environments get more sophisticated, it’s becoming clearer that managing federated resource across hybrid cloud computing environments will soon become a lot easier.
