Cloud hosting company launches Orchestration Service Engine to simplify application deployment across multiple clouds.

July 21, 2014

3 Min Read
GoGrid Puts Cloud at Touch of a Button

GoGrid, known for its BigData cloud and its focus on open cloud environments, today announced an Orchestration Engine Service that it says can enable one-button deployment of applications across multiple clouds, both public and private, and data center infrastructure. (See GoGrid Announces Orchestration Engine for Cloud Services.)

The idea is to simplify the complex process of creating applications that are built on resources housed in multiple clouds and may also draw from on-premises data centers. GoGrid Cloud Hosting 's 1-Button Deploy technology uses the Orchestration Engine Service to make it possible to create applications, trial them, and then move them into deployment across the hybrid environment that exists today in many telecom cloud service providers.

For telcos already partnering with Go Grid on Open Data Solutions -- i.e., using the GoGrid cloud -- the vendor is providing the 1-Button Deploy option at no extra cost.

"For the time being we're offering telco partners the ability to offer our on-demand solutions for free, because we want to entice more ISVs to build solutions that also run on the GoGrid platform," says company CEO John Keagy.

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The attraction is taking the complexity out of provisioning applications, and while GoGrid is initially focused on big data apps, this approach can support other kinds of applications as well, says Caroline Chappell, senior analyst with Heavy Reading. Telecom cloud service providers have been trying to develop this capability themselves so they can offer business customers the ability to stand up a whole range of applications in the cloud without individually engineering each one through a complex process, she says.

Telecom cloud providers can make the provisioning process part of the service they offer, even if the application itself is run by an app partner in a third-party cloud, Chappell notes. That creates the ability for telecom cloud providers to offer a cloud-based "business in a box" type offer that doesn't require complex provisioning of each individual service.

The GoGrid Orchestration Engine Service can work with anything that has a public applications programming interface (API), the company claims. It has two components, says CTO Heather McKelvey: a blueprint that contains the data about the cluster or platform being spun up from the cloud, and orchestration scripts that are responsible for installing the necessary software on virtual machines and bringing them up in the required order.

The service can support multiple clouds and the provider can use the orchestration scripts to determine which components get pulled into which apps and services.

"We have seen a lot of telcos rush into cloud, but the infrastructure space is still being dominated by commodity players," such as Amazon Web Services Inc. , Keagy says.

After investing tens of millions of dollars creating cloud service platforms, telecom operators need to be able to give their sales teams solid products to sell and "that has been a problem for most of the telcos," he adds.

"In many of the cases we see, they have several different cloud platforms internally, but the business problem remains the same," Keagy concludes. "They don't want to sell commodity infrastructure, but it's hard to get to the solution sell."

— Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading

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