The host of new platforms and services that have made their way onto the CIO radar screen in recent years provide organizations with more freedom than ever in how they operate their environments, but that variety also translates into increased complexity. The individual components end up being assembled into vast and rigid tool chains that leave the administrator to deal with the nuances between the different links  at the expense of their time and the company bottom line.

There’s now a better way to run enterprise clouds, claims GigaSpaces Technologies Inc., which has just pulled the curtains back on a new  version of its platform-as-a-service offering that attempts to combine the  disparate pieces of the DevOps puzzle into an integrated whole spanning the full application lifecycle. As far as the company is concerned, that not only encompasses the apps themselves but also the underlying clockwork that keeps the stack ticking along.

Cloudify 3.0 introduces greatly improved support for OpenStack in the form of tight integration with several core parts of the project, including the Neutron networking service, the Heat orchestration layer and the  KeyStone authentication system. Additionally, GigaSpaces claims that the offering has been re-architectured  to make use of Python, the language employed by the core Nova compute component, and the RabbitMQ messaging system that is the default broker in the open-source cloud framework.

OpenStack integration is just the tip of the iceberg. The new version of Cloudify ships with a plug-in mechanism that allows users to bring a wide range of third party solutions into their environments. Extensions for VMware, Inc.’s vSphere and Citrix-backed OpenStack contender Apache CloudStack are available out of the box, while support for Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, IBM’s SoftLayer and the Docker containerization engine is set to arrive in the coming weeks.

To help customers manage all those technologies, Cloudify 3.0 ships with a centralized dashboard that the  company said presents system metrics in terms of their impact on the applications running on top. It provides transparency into  service health as well as progress on deploying new services, updates and resource usage.

More significantly, the monitoring system comes paired with a new orchestration engine that provides a workflow engine based on the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) for creating event-based automation policies. The feature aims to drastically reduce the amount of manual work that goes into troubleshooting problems, thereby not only saving organizations time and effort but also reducing the risk of inconsistencies in large-scale environments spanning multiple silos.

GigaSpaces promises the next release of Cloudify, due to launch in the fourth quarter, will extend that functionality to a wider range of auto-healing and auto-scaling use cases. The update is also set to introduce full syntax compatibility with TOSCA, which is only partially supported in the current version.

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