Cloud management platform

Scalr 5.0 enhancements that support the complex and often conflicting needs of an enterprise adopting cloud include additional policy enforcement, Webhook integrations, and greater control over compute resources. And as announced August 12, Scalr 5.0 also includes the addition of Cost Analytics.

“As cloud streamlines the infrastructure provisioning process, developers are able to provision resources anywhere in the world in mere seconds. While accelerated provisioning processes provide significant competitive advantage, they can also expose the business to significant risk,” said Sebastian Stadil, founder and CEO of Scalr. “As a result, our strategy is to bridge the gap between development and IT, self-service and security, giving each group the tools they need to quickly and easily achieve their goals, whether that be assure cloud security or get product to market faster.”

A webinar, “Scalr 5.0: Greater IT Policy Control, Cost Analytics and Deeper Integrations” will be held September 17th, 2014 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time to introduce new Scalr 5.0 features and functionality, specifically as they pertain to policy control, financial insight, integration and control over compute resources.

Greater IT Policy Control
Scalr 5.0 helps IT better manage cloud infrastructure for availability, performance, security, and compliance with additional IT controls. Specifically, Scalr 5.0 helps enforce policy with Global Orchestration, which allows IT to centrally define policies to be enforced at the instance level. For example, Global Orchestration will help ensure a standard firewall or authentication policy is deployed across all of an organization’s cloud resources. It can also work to enforce the presence of auditing software. Global Orchestration joins other key controls such as Role-Based Access Control and Governance that allows IT to control which cloud resources are made available to end users.

Scalr 5.0 also introduces a SSH Launcher which seamlessly integrates with Scalr’s Role-Based Access Control framework, which means that IT organizations can ensure developers authenticate to instances using their LDAP credentials, giving greater control over role-based security.

Greater Financial Insight
Scalr Cost Analytics has been developed to help Scalr customers overcome the disconnect that exists between Cloud Resource Usage: the launching and running of infrastructure in the cloud, and Cloud Cost Management: understanding and controlling cloud expenditure. Cost Analytics does so by leveraging the substantial amount of infrastructure metadata generated by Scalr (such as “Who launched this instance?” or “What is this machine used for?”), and enables IT departments and their finance counterparts to better understand their costs across public and private clouds.

According to Owen Rogers, Senior Analyst for Digital Economics at 451 Research, “Scalr’s Cost Analytics integration with its enterprise management product allows enterprises to drill down into cost data to understand why costs change, rather than just what cost elements make up the expenditure. This approach makes a lot of sense and should allow enterprises to better relate expenditure to the delivery of IT services, importantly, allowing all parties to be aware of the cost implications of architectural decisions.”

New Integration Capabilities
As a Cloud Management Platform, Scalr is central to development’s provisioning and management of cloud infrastructure and it is therefore important that it integrates with other IT systems, such as CMDBs, or audit and security systems. As a result, Scalr 5.0 introduces Webhooks to allow outbound notifications to be delivered by Scalr to external systems whenever infrastructure events are triggered, such as when an instance is launched or decommissioned. Webhooks are dispatched as standard HTTP JSON requests, so that integration developers feel right at home when using them, and further developers’ ability to self-serve while ensuring appropriate data points are fed back into operational and security systems for audit, change management, and the like.

Greater Control over Compute Resources
With Scalr 5.0, developers can now suspend and resume instances across all clouds where this feature is available. Suspend / resume enables developers to release compute resources they’re not using without losing their work. For example, developers can suspend all development instances for the night when heading home and resume them when they return in the morning. Autoscaling will also now support suspend/resume, allowing developers to minimize start-up times when scaling up their infrastructure to face a surge in traffic.