Multi-level approvals, infrastructure provisioning and management with Red Hat CloudForms

With the evolution of cloud, the need for a centralized system that could manage all the integrated tools and tech was on the up. Thanks to cloud management platforms we have what we all were looking for. Cloud management platforms bolster monitoring and controlling of associated resources with all the necessary information about the tools associated.

Red Hat CloudForms is a prominent name that comes to my mind when I think of cloud management platforms. It is popular for its web-based GUI that can efficiently manage IT services and applications through a high level of automation. With CloudForms, we can automate a wide range of tasks to eliminate errors and drive associated processes. This, in turn, elevates the operational efficiency of organizations considerably. It is capable of automating, provisioning, and load balancing of virtual machines. At the same time, it can help in implementing smart virtual machine workflows, managing the infrastructure and automating cloud instances among others. You can also enable self-service tenant end-users who have authorization-based access to services, track requests, and other account management tools.

In this blog, I will be talking about some of the interesting features of CloudForms and explain its architecture & workflow with reference to a solution that we, at Opcito, provided to one of our customers. Let’s begin with the features of CFME-

Features of CFME

• Insights — Insights refer to gathering intelligence about virtual or cloud infrastructure so that they can be managed effectively. One of the important functions of the CloudForms server is Smart Proxy. A server having this function can initiate SmartState analysis on a virtual machine, template, instance, or even Docker containers. SmartState Analysis is a patented technology that scans the container or virtual machine’s disk image to examine its contents.
• Control — Based on the information retrieved from the insights, the control functionality of CloudForms enforces security and configuration policies. When critical virtual machines are running at unusually high utilization levels, CloudForms will alert and trigger automated workflows that will dynamically scale out the application workload by provisioning more servers.
• Automate — Automate allows us to create and use powerful workflows using the Ruby scripting language and features provided by automation engine such as state machines and service models. CFME automates the orchestration of workloads and resources in virtual infrastructure or cloud.
• Integrate — With the Integrate feature, CloudForms can connect and integrate with many enterprise tools and systems. There are many Ruby gems that enable automation scripts to connect to both RESTful and SOAP APIs. It also has libraries that ease integration with databases.

CloudForms Architecture

A standard system architecture involving CloudForms comprises tenants, groups, and users. Let’s see the role of all these individual components in the architecture –

• Tenants — Tenants share the platform but are completely isolated from one another. They have their own data, network, and security.
• Groups — Groups can be segregated into three categories viz. Approver, Requester, and Viewer. Specific roles are assigned to each of these groups.
• Users — Users belong to different groups and have access based on roles assigned to the groups that they belong to.
• Provisioned Operating System — We can provision a VM with Redhat or Windows as operating system depending on the specifications given in the VM provisioning request.

CFME Providers

CloudForms integrates provider or manager systems to collect data and perform operations. An external virtualization, cloud, or container environment managing virtual machines or instances on different hosts is termed as …read more