While being able to manage application workloads across public and private instances of cloud computing is important, the ultimate end goal should be the ability to play one cloud service provider off against another.
For a few years now GreenButton has been providing a service through which IT organizations could manage multiple cloud service providers. Now the company is making that software available to IT organizations that want to deploy it on their own IT infrastructure.
With the launch of the GreenButton Cloud Fabric at the CloudExpo conference today, GreenButton is joining the cloud operating system fray, which consists of multiple vendors that are all trying to provide management frameworks that span private and public instances of cloud computing.
According to GreenButton CEO Scott Houston, GreenButton is an alternative to management frameworks from rivals such as Eucalyptus, VMware or any one of multiple implementations of OpenStack. The key difference is that as a management framework, the GreenButton Cloud Fabric, says Houston, is not tied to any one cloud computing stack. It supports Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Dell Cloud and any cloud implementation based on OpenStack or VMware vCloud software.
In addition, Houston says GreenButton Cloud Fabric includes time versus cost analytics tools that help IT organizations determine which cloud platform is best suited to handle a particular application workload. GreenButton cloud management software was originally developed to allow organizations such as Pixar to “rightsize” their IT investments by leveraging additional compute resources in the cloud.
As time goes on, it’s becoming increasingly clear that for the foreseeable future cloud computing is going to be hybrid by definition. That may change one day, but for all practical intents and purposes the immediate challenge facing IT is figuring out how they are going to manage a new layer of external enterprise computing resources alongside their existing IT investments. While there are any number of open source frameworks that promise to eventually address that challenge, there are only a handful of options available now.
