Blueprint Automation Fuels Cloud Business Agility

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) published a new white paper highlighting the power of blueprint-driven governance and automation platforms for lowering OPEX and CAPEX waste in data centers while accelerating cloud transformations.

Quali has pioneered an innovative platform for all types of software development, testing, staging, production, and disaster recovery environments. Its building blocks are based on standardized blueprints. Quali’s solutions define how server, network, and storage components must be deployed and configured to optimize cost and minimize risk for each application environment. 

“EMA believes blueprint-driven deployment and management of sandboxes is the right way to turbo boost and de-risk cloud transition and DevOps. It is also the cleanest and most scalable approach to do things right once and for all,” stated the authors.

The EMA white paper found that Quali’s blueprint-driven management of hybrid environments “goes significantly further than simply using standard configuration management software, such as Puppet and Chef,” because those tools specialize only in enforcing and automating server configuration.

“The blueprint-driven approach enables customers to define the entire application infrastructure, including network components, storage, containers, service management, and monitoring tools, as well as test tools and databases,” says Torsten Volk, Managing Director, Hybrid Cloud and Infrastructure Management at EMA Research. “This comprehensive infrastructure definition can then be integrated with DevOps tools such as Jenkins, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack, or Ansible.”

In addition, the EMA white paper indicates that blueprints “bring standardization and repeatability to the data center and are the basis for automation and cost control.” The EMA analysts cited numerous advantages of blueprints including the ability to enforce right sizing; provide user reservations for infrastructure; simplify management; automatically power down unused resources; provide deep business intelligence; and combine multiple clouds and data centers.

Automated blueprint-driven deployment also relieves developers and operations staff from the time-consuming tasks of configuring and deploying development and test environments. In this way, developers can fully test their software under realistic conditions by integrating with other DevOps tools.

Users can instantaneously spin up cloud blueprints for development and testing. Once their work is done, they can quickly tear down those environments, which are completely identical to the actual production environments. This approach enables users to decouple applications from their current environments to be moved or replicated in other clouds for testing.

“We are pleased by EMA’s insightful analysis, which demonstrates how cloud blueprints can help decrease the risk and cost of transitioning to the cloud,” said Shashi Kiran, Chief Marketing Officer of Quali. “Enterprise customers and service providers can leverage blueprints to standardize and scale different initiatives, while the production version is still running in the corporate data center or hybrid cloud environments.”