[Originally published on LinkedIn 12 June 2024]
Brad Parks, CPO/GTM Morpheus Data | Hybrid-Cloud Management Platform sets the stage for this afternoon’s Cloud Field Day 20 session.
For Global 2000 firms, IT is complex and is only getting worse as app teams accelerate and specialize. As an example, a global biopharma organization has apps running on bare metal, VMs, containers, etc. The infrastructure is constrained for capacity, network, observability, etc. And the rest of the org doesn’t care.
Morpheus aims to simplify IT, making IT easier to consume. Think private cloud driven by a lot of automation with a tightly bound stack and a self-service orchestration platform.
Morpheus is that self-service orchestration platform that runs on top of your organization’s infrastructure. With Morpheus, you can provision any service to any cloud on demand. Morpheus is vendor agnostic and can orchestrate any underlying cloud infrastructure.
Brad specifically called out Broadcom/VMware, and is attempting to fill the void created by Broadcom’s recent changes, with KVM/K8s deployment/provisioning, etc.
Additionally, Morpheus centralizes infrastructure as code (IaC), providing cataloging, governance, execution, and state management. And it plans to orchestrate and automate IA and edge computing.
Key stakeholders can benefit from:
- IT/Platform Ops: improved productivity
- Security: embedded security and DevSecOps processes
- Developers: accelerated provisioning
- Finance: cloud cost savings
Morpheus is agnostic and connects to a plethora of existing cloud tools providing rapid time to value – deploy in hours, not months. Additional differentiators and benefits include reducing tool sprawl and costs, eliminate cloud and tool lock-in, and future-proofing your environment.
David Estes demonstrated just a few of the many features — as you can imagine, the power and flexibility of the tool means that there are tons of options.
What I found interesting is the amount of customization and control provided, enabling you to not only set defaults but to apply policies to limit options, features, naming conventions, etc. You can also configure and edit forms in the system, customizing the user interface and user experience. And these customizations and configurations are tied to the RBAC environment, meaning you can have control over user or group options, capabilities, and activities.
The RBAC environment is full-fledged, with the ability to set fine-grained controls over visibility and actionability.
Morpheus, while focused on infrastructure deployment, can also be used for application deployment. Indeed, its history is from app developers getting frustrated with infrastructure deployment.
Discovery features enables Morpheus to take control over previously deployed infrastructure elements.
Martez Reed provided details of the Morpheus platform itself.
The core of the platform includes granular RBA, SSO, multitenancy, a service catalog, audit logging, and a REST API.
Op top of that are the key feature capabilities:
- Infrastructure provisioning
- Cluster management
- Runbook Automation
- cloud Visibility
- Cloud automation.
Morpheus can provision, manage, and orchestrate Private cloud, Public cloud, networking, Automation, Data Protection, and ITSM.
Morpheus is changing with the times, and is now moving to a distributed architecture to support distributed, geographically diverse, solution diverse environments.
While it’s not an AI platform, Morpheus can be used to provision, deploy, and manage an AI environment. It may take some work, but you can build an AI environment such as a PyTorch system, into the self-service catalog for use by data scientists.
MVM, The Embedded KVM-based Hypervisor
Morpheus has been using its own KVM-based hypervisor, MVM, for a long time. The recent acquisition of VMware by Broadcom and subsequent product line changes has motivated Morpheus to commercialize MVM. The MVM storage defaults to Ceph.
During MVM deployment, Morpheus will automatically do resource planning and allocation, picking the best host for each VM. What’s nice about MVM is that it brings VM management into the infrastructure management environment.
Is Morpheus Right for You?
The term platform is widely overused in IT, but it’s appropriate for Morpheus. The solution provides a unification and orchestration layer across your entire infrastructure, for almost any element and vendor. If you’re going to automate your environment and build self-service solutions to lighten the load on your IT team, Morpheus can probably help.
The big caveat is that Morpheus is designed for the largest of large organizations. Which means its highly configurable and very complex to meet their needs. This introduces the possibility that it’s too big and complicated for the more simple use cases of smaller infrastructures and smaller teams. You would be well served to evaluate if you’re going to end up paying for many features you may never need or use.