We’re actually moving to Resolve Platform. We just bought it. It is not fully implemented. However, the system is replacing CloudCenter.

Initially, when we started the project, I was using Terraform. However, Terraform is more a script-orientated type of automation tool. The reason why we then went for CloudCenter was due to the GUI, the workflow development, and certain other things like Workload Manager. And then they also have a billing tool that helps you handle your billing, the billing of all the deployment. It’s just ultimately more useful than Terraform.

As a system integrator, we work with various solutions based on the needs of our customers. This solution is one of many that we implement routinely. We use VMware vRealize Automation, our own CMP, PMG, a multi-cloud manager from Red Hat, Scalr, Cloud Vault, Cloudify, and Cisco CloudCenter. 

For example, we might work with a sovereign customer or a government-based customer. We know that they heavily rely on a private cloud and we check what hypervisor they are using. Are they using ESXi, KVM or another? Based on the hypervisor, we design the overall virtualization platform which can be natively supported by the CMP. If it is VMware heavy, we go with vRealize Automation and if the customer has financial constraints we go with Cloudify so long as the customer agrees on open source. If not, we require everything to be enterprise grid and go with vRealize Automation or MyCloud, which is our own solution. 

If a customer is primarily looking for app modernization and infrastructure as a code format, we provide a custom solution which includes Terraform for provisioning, Ansible for post provisioning, and ServiceNow to integrate components. ServiceNow acts as a frontend, catalog-driven approach where an end user logs in and requests a catalog and a developer would be able to directly consume the Terraform templates and what we have created them for, be it a public cloud or private cloud. 

This project is a little bit of my brainchild. I've worked on this project for the last two and a half years. We worked as a team with everybody else; I have other colleagues that have worked with us to actually build the core of this thing. In the end, the idea is really that once we've done the proof of concept with it, it was on a try and buy basis. Cisco has that type of offering. We're able to try this stuff before we buy it. In the end, we figured out that this was the way we wanted to go. I was a part of that process.

As implementors, we work with a variety of solutions, for example, we also work with Lenovo and Aruba.