Morpheus Data Presents at Cloud Field Day 17

Morpheus Data 101: The Rise of Hybrid Cloud Platform Operations

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For years, Morpheus has led the hybrid cloud management market when it comes to rapid integration of third-party technologies with dozens of out-of-the-box codeless integrations into clouds, ITSM, IPAM, Backups. This session goes deep on the underlying service delivery framework within Morpheus and showcases how third-party plugins can be developed to expose data for custom reports, pull in third-party observability and AIOps information, extend cloud connectivity, enable custom user dashboards, and more.

Brad Parks explains that Morpheus aims to bring teams together and simplify how developers, finance, and operations teams interact with hybrid clouds, containers, and automation tools. He compares the company’s mission to the TV show “Ted Lasso,” highlighting the quote “Taking on a challenge is a lot like riding a horse. You’re comfortable while you’re doing it. You’re probably doing it wrong.” He emphasizes the importance of automating manual processes and enabling self-service for various roles within an organization. Parks outlines the core use cases Morpheus addresses, including consistent provisioning across different cloud environments, Kubernetes cluster management, scaling automation initiatives, and integration with IT service management and monitoring tools. He also discusses the challenges faced by IT organizations, the security, development, and finance teams, and how Morpheus provides solutions for each. Parks concludes by highlighting the platform’s features, such as integration with existing tools, a fine-grained RBAC model, support for development workflows, cost optimization, and data-driven insights for chargeback and showback. He mentions the platform’s scalability, integration capabilities, and freedom of choice in provisioning across various cloud endpoints.

Personnel: Brad Parks

Morpheus Foundation: Developer Self-Service and Platform Operations

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This demo and deep dive will illustrate how enterprises and service providers can enable DevOps speed and agility while also improving control and reducing cost of delivering IT services. We’ll show how easy it is to integrating technologies like VMware, Nutanix, AWS, Azure, GCP, ServiceNow, Terraform, Ansible, and more while providing a governance framework and policy engine to bring Developers, Security, Finance Operations teams closer together.

Dave Estes, the co-founder and CTO of Morpheus, gave a presentation on the developer and self-service aspects of Morpheus. The presentation included a demonstration of the platform’s features, starting with the new customizable dashboard and self-service portal. Morpheus is a self-service platform that covers various aspects of infrastructure, such as provisioning, networking, lifecycle management, and costing. The presentation focused on provisioning instances, showcasing the flexibility to create basic virtual machines or more complex clusters. It also highlighted the adaptive configuration options based on different cloud providers and the ability to automate tasks like installing Apache, setting up scaling, backups, replication, and power schedules. The presentation also discussed how Morpheus handles eventual inconsistencies and provides a comprehensive history of actions and diagnostics. Additionally, the platform supports CLI automation, API integration, and can function as a Terraform state management system. The presentation emphasized Morpheus as an internal developer platform that eliminates the need for building such a system from scratch, providing benefits like abstraction, easy transition between infrastructure modules, and compatibility with various environments and architectures.

Personnel: David Estes

Morpheus Data Plugins: Extensibility for Hybrid Cloud Platform Operations

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For years, Morpheus has led the hybrid cloud management market when it comes to rapid integration of third-party technologies with dozens of out-of-the-box codeless integrations into clouds, ITSM, IPAM, Backups. This session goes deep on the underlying service delivery framework within Morpheus and showcases how third-party plugins can be developed to expose data for custom reports, pull in third-party observability and AIOps information, extend cloud connectivity, enable custom user dashboards, and more.

In this session, Martez Reed, Director of Technical Marketing at Morpheus Data, introduces the extensibility features of the Morpheus platform for hybrid cloud operations. He explains that Morpheus is available as a Linux package, installable on-premises or in the public cloud, and highlights its highly modular and extensible nature. The platform supports a plugin framework that allows users to extend its capabilities beyond the out-of-the-box features. Reed discusses various areas of extensibility, such as custom reports and UI customization, including the ability to create a custom dashboard. He also mentions the integration of third-party services through plugins, providing examples like DNS, load balancer, and backup integrations. The Morpheus exchange is mentioned as a repository of curated plugins. The session concludes with a discussion on plugin deployment, management, and versioning, as well as the potential for private repositories and security considerations.

Personnel: Martez Reed

Morpheus Data Workflows: Scaling Automation and IaC via Self-Service

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Going beyond developer self-service and provisioning of application instances, this session will spotlight how Morpheus can be used to help IT simplify operations and scale GitOps style automation initiatives. By decoupling the creation and execution of automation scripts and infrastructure-as-code patterns, organizations can streamline and govern the use of technologies like Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, PowerShell, Python, and more. The session will also spotlight the new dynamic automation target feature which enables use cases like patch management, security remediation, and routine maintenance.

In this session, Martez Reed, Director of Technical Marketing with Morpheus Data, discusses scaling automation in Infrastructure as Code (IAC) through self-service. He talks about the challenges of using YAML and raw automation, such as the lack of user-friendliness and difficulty in understanding available environments. Martez highlights the importance of focusing on the business value rather than getting caught up in the coolest way to implement automation. He explores the concept of click ops and the use of user interfaces (UIs) and no-code solutions for efficient and quick outcomes. Martez demonstrates how Morpheus provides a platform for creating Terraform Cloud workspaces using UI-based interactions, simplifying the sharing and scaling of automation across organizations. The platform’s role-based access control, workflow automation, and integration capabilities enable users to accomplish their tasks without the complexities of manual scripting or infrastructure management. The discussion also touches on features like dynamic automation targeting and the adoption of immutability in handling system redeployment and patching.

Personnel: Martez Reed