“Organizations, now more than ever, are looking for diversity in terms of where they’re hosting their workloads,” noted Martez Reed, director of technical marketing at Morpheus Data, a cloud management software company, during a presentation at the Cloud Field Day event in June.
As companies look to cut costs and spend more frugally while wrestling with a growing diversity of workloads, they favor cloud platforms that would replace point solutions with broad and holistic choices.
Approximately 92% companies use a mix of public and private clouds to host workloads. Half their production workloads are divided between various public cloud platforms, and the remaining half stays in private data centers.
“In this world, [companies] are looking for a platform to help provide some sanity and rationalization across all of these different platforms in which their workloads may end up needing to run,” he said.
A Continually Expanding Footprint
Morpheus Data is working on making it easier for enterprises to navigate the vagaries of this hybrid multi-cloud world. The Morpheus Platform is a hybrid cloud management solution that provides a breadth of capabilities aimed at infrastructure provisioning, cluster management, runbook automation, and cloud visibility and optimization use cases.
The platform provides extensible support for public and private cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, OCI, Nutanix, OpenStack, vSphere, and more. Out-of-the-box, it offers a complement of codeless cloud integrations, but the extensibility allows more names to be added continually.
“It provides us the ability to tap into new clouds as they come up, without having to do a lot of heavy lifting from a native integration standpoint, and allows us to work with third-party development teams, services partners and technology alliance partners to develop new plugin integrations,” told Reed.
Reed explained that the cloud plugin integrations make calls into the APIs that are exposed by the underlying technologies, right away ensuring compatibility.
Forces and Factors Effecting Changing
The market dynamics, in the recent years, have heavily impacted customer behavior, reshaping the demand curves in multi-cloud. Many companies have reset and resized their offerings to fit the new economy.
Morpheus Data has found a way to ride the volatility by tuning the product to best address the need of the hour.
“Over the last 18 to 24 months, there’s been a number of market dynamics that have greatly impacted us, as well as the broader industry.” Reed pointed to the distinct events that have most influenced their product engineering.
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware is one of the most consequential and publicized acquisitions of the recent times.
“What that has caused is for customers to look at options. It doesn’t mean that they are going to move off of VMware right this instance, or even anytime in the future, but they’re at the point where they’re looking for alternatives whether that be Nutanix, OpenStack, or any other solution that might be thrown into the ring.”
In the geopolitical landscape, sovereign clouds are the newest development. With rising geopolitical tensions and red tapes around data, these clouds are seeing a surge in adoption.
“Outside of North America, organizations love for their data to stay within their country and their boundaries.”
Sovereign clouds allow organizations to store data in local data centers, thereby fulfilling their digital sovereign obligations.
Another trend that is quietly taking shape in full velocity for a while is workload repatriation.
“Whether we think it’s real or not, people are seriously looking at whether it makes sense to move workloads out of the public cloud into on-prem or hosted colo environments,” Reed remarked.
This is driven by concerns like data locality, evolving cyber threats and the rising costs in public cloud.
Topping these, the overarching theme dictating the market is AI. The AI revolution has occasioned tidal shifts, bringing ashore fresh problems to solve.
“[AI] is a continually emerging use case, and in many ways, it’s creating a challenge of how we think about where workloads are deployed and how they’re deployed, particularly when you look at things like data gravity that comes with AI/ML workloads.”
A Highly Resilient Architecture
In addition to its broader suite of features, Morpheus also offers capabilities addressing the requirements emerging from the market shifts. The cornerstone of the Morpheus Platform is its distributed architecture which is the secret to its seamless handling of platform diversity, an ever-growing trend worrying CIOs about piling tech complexity.
The platform supports geographically distributed deployments by leveraging what is called distributed workers. These are lightweight agents that give the platform the ability to reach into diverse infrastructures, particularly on-prem and colo environments, without a VPN or direct connect. The worker to the Morpheus Platform is what MID Server is to ServiceNow, said Reed.
Using this capability, service providers and OEMs can hook into customer data centers and manage and provision workloads via Morpheus.
When it comes to AI, Morpheus Data has a distinctive approach than most vendors. “Morpheus is not an AI platform or an ML platform,” Reed stated.
However, it does have capabilities built into it that Reed said “are extremely valuable” when deploying workloads that leverage AI/ML capabilities.
For example, the platform’s ability to tie into Kubernetes, VMs and hypervisors both on premises and in the cloud opens it up to a whole ecosystem, enhancing users’ reach into a lot of solutions.
Additionally, Morpheus offers a self-service catalog that allows platform engineers, data engineers and developers to congregate in one place and build and request resources on demand.
The platform’s integrations enable easy workload orchestration via solutions like Ansible, Chef and Puppet. Teams can build repeatable templates for AI/ML workloads using these.
The plugin framework is particularly helpful for AI workloads as it lends additional extensibility to tap into AI and GPU-centric insights.
“The plug-in architecture provides the ability to extend it beyond what’s included out-of-the-box, and tap into things like IPAM, DNS, CMDB, task automation that the platform doesn’t natively support. It allows us to work with various third-party providers and other organizations,” he said.
As part of the plugin architecture, Morpheus offers a developer’s portal where documentations about plugins are viewable in a centralized location. Plugin Scaffolding and Plugin Exchange are other places where information about plugins, and existing plugins from Morpheus and other vendors can be found.
Don’t forget to watch the Morpheus Data presentations from the Cloud Field Day event to get a deep-dive and demo of the platform.
