Posted by Jarid Cottrell on October 09, 2014
Developers, cloud enthusiasts, and supporters of open source descended on Mahwah, New Jersey, this week for RedHat’s first ManageIQ Design Summit.
As a founding partner and ardent supporter of the ManageIQ community, it’s been exciting for our Booz Allen team to watch it grow since its launch earlier this year. And the Summit marked the first time that we, as a community, were able to come together to share best practices, lessons learned and practical applications for the platform. Participants were able to follow two tracks at the event, Design and Extend, and I was fortunate enough to speak to both on the topic of cloud service broker technologies. Specifically, with the Extend attendees, we covered how to create a fully functional open source cloud broker platform using ManageIQ. And, with the Design group, we proposed a blueprint of ManageIQ’s future development areas and our roadmap to enhance the overarching cloud broker capabilities.
At Booz Allen, these are critically important conversations for us as our clients in commercial and government sectors continue to explore solutions in the cloud. We’ve recently seen our clients – no matter the industry - struggle with the inherent complexities that come with moving to the cloud. Just think about your own organization, there are likely multiple iterations of the cloud with multiple owners, access points and vendors. It’s a headache juggling it all effectively; trust me, I’ve been there.
Now here’s your aspirin, in the form of a cloud broker technology solution—powered by ManageIQ. It allows users to distill the chaos into a singular marketplace—think Orbitz for cloud—from which the entire catalog of services and environments can be browsed, packaged, managed and assessed. We’ve chosen to open source our cloud broker platform, using RedHat, because we believe that the flexibility and interoperability that it offers are necessary in today’s fast moving, quick to change marketplace.
Coming out of the Summit, we plan to engage with the community to make cloud service brokers even more accessible. Stay tuned; there will be more to come.
