The document discusses the ServiceMesh Agility Platform, which provides a single, consolidated platform for enabling on-demand, self-service IT operating models for large enterprises. It allows for graphically designing cloud-portable, multi-tier applications and platforms that can be deployed to any of 16 public or private clouds. The platform provides a single control point for governance, orchestration, and delivery across the entire application lifecycle. It uses policies to provision virtualized storage and optimize utilization.
Who is ServiceMesh? We’ve been in the EMC Select program only recently, but as a company have been around since 2008We sell a Cloud Management Platform called the Agility Platform… and we sell it to very large Global Enterprises like UBS, Pfizer, Visa, and othersThe Agility Platform is a Cloud Management Platform… and its used to deploy and manage enterprise-grade platforms and applications portfolios into hybrid clouds. Our customers use the Agility Platform to govern and deliver of entire IT service portfolios that are cloud-based (combos of infra, platforms, apps)…. and its done in an on-demand and self-service manner directly to the end users that need them. (not IT ops, but Business Unit dev teams) These customers are doing this to implement a new IT operating model… and provide them with significant agility and cost saving benefits relative to the way their IT organization operated in the past. And our Agility Platform is a key enabler in doing this. One of the keys to really extending those self-service capabilities to end users…. And one of the things thats unique about the Agility Platform, is that we’ve taken a very application-centric approach to cloud governance….. What I mean by that…is that we provide an extensible policy framework that’s very powerful, and allows you to create an unlimited number of custom policies based on operational parameters, security parameters, compliance parameters, lifecycle events, and other things that you specify. And by using these high level policies…. You can automate and govern IT resource consumption across large enterprises from a single control point ….. and simplify operational complexity by managing all of this across different hybrid clouds. If you look at the graphic here……The Agility Platform itself is one, integrated product. And it consists of five product modules, and they’re all organized along the lifecycle of a cloud workload:Planner is used for scoring and evaluating different workloads to determine their suitability to migrate to the cloud. Designer is a graphical workbench to assemble cloud portable stacks, templates, and complex application topologies for deployment across diverse hybrid clouds. Store is our self-service portal for provisioning IT resource portfolios. Release Manager is an easy to use visual dashboard to promote software builds and deployment environments across SDLC stages. Operations is a consolidated runtime management console where you aggregate performance monitoring and IT resource consumption information across instances and clouds under management. All of this sits on top of a core platform…for governance, security, and lifecycle management. Agility ties these modules together into continuous lifecycle…. So you can have seamless promotion of workloads from one module to the next. Agility also give you the ability to deploy workloads portably across different clouds. We support currently 16 different private and public clouds. And we’ve also got a very comprehensive API and adaptors to tie directly into an organization’s existing SDLC toolchain and existing IT operations tools.
NOTES: Fundamental to this solution is what we’re calling “Common Application Platforms”, and it provides an initial catalyst to start aligning both groups and delivering value to each.What “Common Application Platforms” allow you to do, is embed IT Ops best practices around the governance and configuration of the underlying infrastructure and platforms that your Dev and Test teams need to do their work. These best practice are captured in this pre-configured, production-like “container” for the application code… that can be used upstream by Dev and Test groups from the beginning. This way, the coding and testing work is always aligned to its eventual production deployment environment. That way, the two are always kept in sync, and the chance for configuration related-defects to be introduced into production are reduced dramatically. Both teams get involved in creating and using these CAP, and both teams benefit…. IT Ops gets involved now from the very beginning… rather than just waiting for something to be thrown over the wall at them:Create standardized, multi-tier enterprise application stacks… which can include very complex topologiesEmbed standard SOE agents and utilitiesGovern and define security zone requirements and operational SLAs… which by the way can vary across different roles or teams across the SDLCDev get to benefit as well:Deploy to High fidelity production-like environments… from the very beginning… that are available self-service and on-demand… directly from their current IDENo longer has to worry about configuring app stacks before they can do their work So both teams get involved, and both teams benefit.
Current Limitations:Provisioning delaysLack of automated governance controlsManual configuration delaysConfiguration mismatches and errorsExpense reconciliation for projects is a nightmareGrowing governance/security audit pressuresPROBLEMS RESULTING FROM DISCONTINUOUS DELIVERYRepeated Infrastructure Setup for Unit, Acceptance, Performance, Integration Testing is Error Prone & Time ConsumingMismatch Between Prod and Pre-Prod Environments Implies Tests Do Not reflect Production ScenarioLimited FTEs & Complexity Implies Tests Need to be Run Sequentially If Cost of Infrastructure is Fixed, then Parallel Testing is ProhibitiveLonger Time in App Creation, Increases Risk, Since Business Imperatives Might Have ChangedResults in Small Number of Large Releases Which Increases Cost of FailureProblems Compounded if Application & Platform Lifecycles are discrete, otherwise dependencies slow down delivery