GigaOm Radar for Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs)v3.0

1. Executive Summary

Responding to digital transformation and evolving business needs, organizations are moving their applications to the cloud. Multicloud and hybrid cloud infrastructures are now the norm; however, data centers and legacy applications haven’t disappeared. This means organizations must contend with disparate systems and users around the world, all of which lead to complex and hard-to-manage infrastructure.

Cloud management platforms (CMPs) help organizations to manage these complex environments and control costs more effectively. A CMP that can manage both on-premises automation and orchestration needs, as well as the cloud hosting, will provide greater value than separate tools that do only on-premises or in public cloud deployments.

Previously, essential functions such as asset tracking and dependency mapping ran in data centers with redundancy to protect against outages and ensure high levels of uptime. They used the asset tag of a physical server to track places where an application was running. The number of CPUs, network connections, and the amount of RAM and storage physical servers used was static and sized for peak expected workloads years in advance. This resulted in oversizing and wasted capacity.

Today, infrastructure is ephemeral, and organizations can’t rely on a physical server’s asset tag to track where an application is running. Additionally, in the cloud, none of these values—memory, CPU (count, type, speed, generation), storage, and network properties—are fixed. This is part of the promise of the cloud—to pay for only what is being used.

To ensure cloud implementations live up to this expectation, management systems must be able to track utilization, performance, and cost and relate them to the solution the business is paying for. CMPs provide real-time or near real-time situational awareness of the health and performance of a business solution. This helps businesses avoid both overspending and unplanned outages due to lack of capacity management.

More comprehensive CMP solutions also manage storage, security, disaster recovery, system health and performance, and application lifecycles. These are just a few examples of the functions that must now be managed across multiple planes while accounting for multiple, often differing requirements—cloud versus on-premises, hardware versus software, and ephemeral versus persistent storage, for example.

This is our third year evaluating the cloud management platform (CMP) solution space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 20 of the top CMP solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading CMP offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.