Scalr: All Inclusive Cloud Management Platform for IT, DevOps Engineers & the CFO
The cloud computing landscape is just as busy and swiftly changing as ever. Today I’d like to freeze-frame the cloud management platform sector for you, specifically giving you a clear idea of where Scalr fits in, its value, and how the technology achieves that goal for our customers.
Scalr is a cloud management platform (CMP), which Gartner defines as “products that incorporate self-service interfaces, provision system images, enable metering and billing, and provide for some degree of workload optimisation through established policies.”
Here at Scalr, we find that there are really two camps of CMPs that fit this description – Legacy CMPs, those that apply to the cloud a traditional IT infrastructure provisioning workflow that still requires manual approval; and Cloud Native CMPs, those that support an automated, forward-thinking DevOps-centric approach to cloud management.
At Scalr, we believe the latter approach allows businesses to achieve the true promise of cloud computing: self-service provisioning that results in greater agility and increased efficiency. Scalr helps achieve these results in several important ways and we do so by supporting three key constituents:
- DevOps – Scalr is focused on streamlining the provisioning, configuration and orchestration process for DevOps engineers, allowing them to accelerate application development. Instead of provisioning individual resources, Scalr empowers them with a high-level interface and templates which can create an entire operating environment in a single click or API call. Realising the promise of the self-service cloud, Scalr’s application environment automation also features backup, disaster recovery, and auto-scaling.Further enabling DevOps is Scalr’s extensible platform that provides numerous hooks that integrate with software like Chef , Docker and Salt that engineers use on a daily basis. All of this benefits developers by allowing them to focus on developing, increasing their productivity and in turn reducing time-to-market.
- IT – Developers aren’t bogged down with process because Scalr allows IT teams to retain ownership of information security and compliance in a fully automated way. This enables IT to transparently ensure applications and workloads are running in clouds that comply with established service management, governance and compliance policies. IT can effectively reduce operational risk because Scalr allows them to create and manage policies for resource placement, role-based access control, and change management. Moreover, Scalr reduces supplier risk and vendor lock-in by supporting the leading public and private clouds, enabling a true multi- and/or hybrid cloud strategy.
- CFO – With Scalr’s new Cost Analytics features, finance is able to apply a sensible financial schema in a transparent, non-intrusive manner, giving finance visibility into cloud costs. In addition to reporting, Scalr provides showback and chargeback features that enable finance to maintain budgets. With Scalr, finance can drill down into cost data to understand what comprises an expenditure, and just as importantly, why those costs change over time.
We like to say that Scalr delivers balance for development, IT and finance by delivering the precise control IT requires and the financial oversight finance demands all while removing the barriers to efficiency that development confronts managing cloud infrastructure. The result: businesses are able to reap cloud computing’s efficiency and agility for true business gains.
If you’d like to learn more about Scalr and how we help our clients, please check us out at: www.scalr.com or reach out to us at @scalr.
Andrew McLean is the Studio Director at Disruptive Live, a Compare the Cloud brand. He is an experienced leader in the technology industry, with a background in delivering innovative & engaging live events. Andrew has a wealth of experience in producing engaging content, from live shows and webinars to roundtables and panel discussions. He has a passion for helping businesses understand the latest trends and technologies, and how they can be applied to drive growth and innovation.