Morpheus breaks the Hybrid Cloud Management Platform mould

In 2020, Morpheus grew over 70% by helping complex enterprises lower cloud costs and simplify the management of hybrid cloud infrastructure. With today’s release, Morpheus is announcing the industry’s first unified control plane to help platform engineering teams bring together cloud and container management as well as infrastructure automation.

Highlights from Morpheus v5.3.1 include:

• Morpheus Kubernetes updates to simplify how clients build, manage, and consume container clusters in hybrid-cloud and mixed platform environments.

• Morpheus Terraform provider and new Terraform instance types eliminate automation islands while simplifying on-premises infrastructure-as-code.

• Dozens of cloud management updates including expanded Google Cloud Platform and VMware integration as well as custom UI and reporting plug-ins.

Today’s infrastructure and operations teams are facing a major complexity and skills gap crisis as they struggle to enable developers, manage hybrid clouds, and facilitate the shift to containers. The result is a rapidly changing market and a convergence of cloud and container offerings. Details can be found in the 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Cloud Management Tooling,1 which features Morpheus as a representative vendor.

“It has become virtually impossible for IT teams to manage an increasingly complex set of cloud services, container platforms, and automation tools,” said Brad Parks, Chief Marketing Officer at Morpheus Data. “Customers are flocking to Morpheus because we eliminate technology silos and bring order to cloud, container, and automation chaos.”

Simplifying how enterprises build, manage, and consume Kubernetes on any cloud

Most companies now report increasing adoption of containers, with deployments running across a mix of private and public clouds. Unfortunately, teams managing virtualized and hybrid cloud infrastructure are now being stretched to the breaking point as they take on Kubernetes. It’s no surprise that a lack of skilled resources and operational complexity are often cited as top challenges. 

Morpheus has already helped hundreds of enterprises reduce hybrid cloud complexity while avoiding vendor lock-in and is bringing those same benefits to container management within its unified and agnostic self-service platform. Updates include:

• CNCF-certified Morpheus Kubernetes Engine (MKE) updated to 1.20 which enables simple deployment of consistent vanilla Kubernetes to dozens of supported clouds.

• The simple addition of packages and services such as Prometheus, Grafana, Istio, and others within the point-and-click Kubernetes provisioning wizard.

• Support of brownfield Kubernetes clusters such as AKS, EKS, OpenShift, Rancher, etc. updated to Kubernetes 1.20 to eliminate ‘Kubernetes-only’ tool overhead.

• Consolidated management of dozens of new Kubernetes objects for cluster access, nodes, workloads, networking, storage, and more to improve operational efficiency.

This means enterprise platform teams can eliminate the need to build, manage, and consume Kubernetes in a completely different control plane from their virtualized and cloud-native platform-as-a-service services. It also reduces lock-in as customers evaluate proprietary stacks such as VMware Tanzu or Red Hat OpenShift.

Eliminating automation islands by bridging infrastructure as code gaps

As enterprises have embraced Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform, they report challenges governing workflows and bridging the gap between infrastructure automation and application configuration. Linking tools like Ansible to Terraform can be difficult and expensive when you combine the cost of Terraform Enterprise with Ansible Tower on top of what enterprises are already spending on legacy VMware automation.

Morpheus has been on the leading edge of infrastructure automation since its inception with support for native IaC syntax as well as third-party IaC including AWS CloudFormation, Azure ARM, and HashiCorp Terraform. Morpheus was an early proponent of GitOps with the ability to link IaC and configuration scripts to repositories for version control and continuous automation. Efficiency-minded enterprises have also reduced costs substantially by using Morpheus to eliminate spend associated with Ansible Tower and Terraform Enterprise.

In Morpheus v5.3.1, customers can now take advantage of Terraform Instance Types, providing a catalog front-end to Terraform modules and directly linking IaC provisioned resources to automation tools like Ansible, Chef, SaltStack, Puppet, and more. By attaching phase-based automation to IaC, operations teams can fully control the lifecycle of a Terraform resource and simplify post-provisioning tasks. These Terraform instances can even be exposed to ITSM tools such as ServiceNow with just a handful of mouse clicks and zero added cost.

Morpheus is also simplifying the use of Terraform in on-premises environments with the development of its own Morpheus Terraform provider. Traditionally, using Terraform on-premises has required separate providers for the dozens of tools that operations teams use on-prem including IPAM, DNS, hypervisors, and more. The Morpheus Terraform provider will enable Terraform users to have a single unified provider to utilize across any on-prem or public cloud without adding complexity.

Bringing the cloud experience on-premises and extending control to public clouds

Over the last 18 months, Morpheus has been named as a leading vendor and strong performer in hybrid cloud management analysis from major industry analyst firms. Much of this recognition comes from a feature set that spans self-service provisioning, governance and security, developer enablement, and cloud resource optimization.

With the latest release, Morpheus has continued this market-leading trajectory with several core hybrid cloud management platform updates including:

• Google Cloud Platform (GCP) enhancements including more flexible region scoping plus the creation and management of projects, security groups, and networking objects including networks, subnets, routers, and firewalls.

• VMware updates for those moving from NSX-V to NSX-T including the ability to create and manage NSX-T load balancers, DHCP objects, and distributed firewalls in both single and multi-tenant deployments.

• Morpheus plug-in framework enhancements enable systems integrators, customers, and alliance partners to create custom reports and custom user interface extensions for server tabs and instances.