Cloud management company Morpheus Data LLC updated its platform today with new capabilities that make it easier to build, deploy and manage Kubernetes-based container applications.

Morpheus Data provides management capabilities for various private and public cloud platforms. Its platform is primarily designed for companies that operate “hybrid” strategies, where they have workloads running across multiple cloud infrastructures.

The company’s platform takes care of things such as orchestration, user permissions, cost optimization, cloud brokerage. It also provides an uptime dashboard as well as continuous integration and continuous deployment capabilities.

Not least, it provides capabilities for managing software containers, which are used to host modern applications that can run on a variety of information technology infrastructures. That’s the main focus of today’s update.

Morpheus v4.0 integrates the new fully managed Morpheus Kubernetes Service, which makes it easier for its customers to get the container orchestration platform up and running. Kubernetes is a tool that’s used to manage large clusters of software containers, but it’s also a complex beast that normally requires specialist skills to implement and maintain.

In addition to its own managed Kubernetes distribution, Morpheus said it will support similar services from popular cloud companies such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC.

That means is that enterprises will be able to “standardize and automate the provisioning of application stacks on bare metal servers, virtual machines, or Kubernetes clusters no matter where those resources are located,” the company said. This provides simplicity for those modernizing large complex application portfolios and eliminates the limitations of cloud and container automation tools which are specifically tied to a single hypervisor or operating system.

With the deeper Kubernetes integration, Morpheus also adds comprehensive role-based access controls, which Wikibon analyst James Kobielus said is one of the most noteworthy new features in this release.

“For users who are attempting to lock down distributed resources and provide fine-grained permissioning, cross-cloud RBAC is essential,” Kobielus told SiliconANGLE. “Wikibon is impressed with Morpheus’ policy tools for administering RBAC across Kubernetes clusters running on diverse private and public clouds.”

The company said Morpheus Kubernetes Service has been validated by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which governs the Kubernetes open-source project.

“Enterprises want agility, but skill gaps and technology silos are standing in the way,” said Brad Parks, Morpheus Data’s vice president of business development. “Morpheus accelerates business transformation by bringing together VM automation, multicloud management, and Kubernetes service delivery in a single unified platform built for Dev and Ops.”

Other updates in Morpheus v4.0 include tighter integration with Ansible, which is an open source IT configuration management and automation platform developed by IBM Corp.-owned Red Hat Inc.

The company has also added a new Morpheus Jobs engine that provides self-service automation of various tasks, including infrastructure and patch management.

Image: Morpheus Data/Facebook