Conclusions

Cloudify 2 is a very useful tool for effective orchestration across the borders of different clouds. The possibility of creating multitier clouds in particular makes administrators happy, because it allows them to manage VMs across the boundaries of individual cloud providers without troubles. Options such as automatic horizontal scaling are useful for applications in the cloud and even ensure that applications remain online when exposed to heavy load (Figure  5).

Figure 5: Cloudify has information for statistics fans: The load indicator shows which resources the individual applications are currently using.

The solution benefits because Cloudify really does remain faithful to the PaaS motto: Everything that happens in Cloudify happens on the basis of specific apps and not on the basis of the VMs on which the apps run.

That said, some design concepts implemented in Cloudify 2 do not exactly provoke an enthusiastic response. The fact that the service is based entirely on Java will not go down well with many admins. Additionally, it will probably take a while for admins to be happy with the system of recipes in Cloudify. The fact that you can use Chef as an alternative is a good thing.

Cloudify 3.0 holds a great deal of promise, even if only a small demo of the tool was publicly available when this issue went to press. Cloudify 3 has the potential to be an important component, especially for OpenStack setups.

GigaSpaces apparently sees the future of Cloudify to be tied to the OpenStack context, but the company promises to keep the features for other clouds and continue to support them. One thing is for sure: Anyone looking for a useful tool to maintain PaaS components as part of a public cloud should definitely take a look at Cloudify.