theCube Interview: Talking about Cisco CloudCenter Suite

Cisco’s Matt Ferguson and Ali Ghorbani Moghadam discuss CloudCenter Suite, a cloud management platform designed for hybrid and multi-cloud environments (0:20-0:27). The suite aims to provide tools for IT to enable speed and agility for developers (18:28-18:34).

CloudCenter Suite consists of three main modules (0:56):

Workload Manager: This module allows users to model workloads into blueprints and deploy them to specific infrastructures, whether on-premise or in a public cloud.

Action Orchestrator: An orchestration platform that applies code, scripts, and functions to set up infrastructure or perform other capabilities. Ali Ghorbani Moghadam emphasizes its role as an orchestration engine for DevOps activities and CI/CD pipelines, enabling fault tolerance and retries (6:05-6:31). It also supports custom adapters for various tools like Ansible, Terraform, and RESTful APIs.

Cost Optimizer: This component helps users understand spending, manage budgets, and categorize costs across public and on-premise environments. It provides real-time data to help with system decision-making, especially for deploying microservices in large companies where cost is a key factor in choosing between public cloud providers like Azure or AWS.

The suite can be self-hosted on-premise or accessed as a SaaS platform.

The discussion also highlights how CloudCenter Suite addresses challenges for developers by:

• Removing blockers in the development process and supporting agile methodologies.
• Providing fault tolerance and self-healing capabilities for CI/CD pipelines, allowing developers to integrate existing tools like Jenkins.
• Enabling loosely coupled systems, preventing disruptions when integrating third-party connections and allowing the system to heal itself when endpoints are down.
• Helping to manage technical debt by providing templating capabilities, allowing developers to iterate on existing templates rather than reinventing things.
• Bridging the on-premise world with the public cloud through API-driven connectivity, leveraging services like AWS EKS while maintaining control.

Ultimately, the platform empowers developers to focus on their code and business logic, with the system handling automation and self-healing.