Morpheus Data, the hybrid cloud application orchestration company, is releasing a significant update of its platform, aiming to help enterprise customers streamline the transition to containers and simplify the adoption of infrastructure-as-code.
Highlights from Morpheus v5.3.1 include:
- Morpheus Kubernetes updates to simplify how clients build, manage, and consume container clusters in hybrid-cloud and mixed platform environments.
- Morpheus Terraform provider and new Terraform instance types eliminate automation islands while simplifying on-premises infrastructure-as-code.
- Dozens of cloud management updates including expanded Google Cloud Platform and VMware integration as well as custom UI and reporting plug-ins.
“It has become virtually impossible for IT teams to manage an increasingly complex set of cloud services, container platforms, and automation tools,” said Brad Parks, chief marketing officer at Morpheus Data. “Customers are flocking to Morpheus because we eliminate technology silos and bring order to cloud, container, and automation chaos.”
According to the vendor, Morpheus has already helped hundreds of enterprises reduce hybrid cloud complexity while avoiding vendor lock-in and is bringing those same benefits to container management within its unified and agnostic self-service platform. Updates include:
- CNCF-certified Morpheus Kubernetes Engine (MKE) updated to 1.20 which enables simple deployment of consistent vanilla Kubernetes to dozens of supported clouds.
- The simple addition of packages and services such as Prometheus, Grafana, Istio, and others within the point-and-click Kubernetes provisioning wizard.
- Support of brownfield Kubernetes clusters such as AKS, EKS, OpenShift, Rancher, etc. updated to Kubernetes 1.20 to eliminate ‘Kubernetes-only’ tool overhead.
- Consolidated management of dozens of new Kubernetes objects for cluster access, nodes, workloads, networking, storage, and more to improve operational efficiency.
This means enterprise platform teams can eliminate the need to build, manage, and consume Kubernetes in a completely different control plane from their virtualized and cloud-native platform-as-a-service services. It also reduces lock-in as customers evaluate proprietary stacks such as VMware Tanzu or Red Hat OpenShift.
In Morpheus v5.3.1, customers can now take advantage of Terraform Instance Types, providing a catalog front-end to Terraform modules and directly linking IaC provisioned resources to automation tools like Ansible, Chef, SaltStack, Puppet, and more.
By attaching phase-based automation to IaC, operations teams can fully control the lifecycle of a Terraform resource and simplify post-provisioning tasks. These Terraform instances can even be exposed to ITSM tools such as ServiceNow with just a handful of mouse clicks and zero added cost.
Morpheus is also simplifying the use of Terraform in on-premises environments with the development of its own Morpheus Terraform provider..
With the latest release, Morpheus is adding several core hybrid cloud management platform updates including:
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP) enhancements including more flexible region scoping plus the creation and management of projects, security groups, and networking objects including networks, subnets, routers, and firewalls.
- VMware updates for those moving from NSX-V to NSX-T including the ability to create and manage NSX-T load balancers, DHCP objects, and distributed firewalls in both single and multi-tenant deployments.
- Morpheus plug-in framework enhancements enable systems integrators, customers, and alliance partners to create custom reports and custom user interface extensions for server tabs and instances.
For more information about these updates, visit https://morpheusdata.com/.