Cisco CloudCenter - Any Application. Any Cloud. One platform

“Dad, what are the clouds made of?”
- Linux server basically ...

Hello everyone, I haven’t picked up a pen for a long time ... For an interesting coincidence, I got a job at a company that collaborated with another company in the field of cloud technologies. I had to work 3 months at the old job and got there a new year, in a word, when I came to work with them it turned out that: firstly, they were sold and now they are part of a completely small company (I don’t intentionally mention the name so as not to be considered advertising) ), and secondly, the cloud company that was called Cliqr as a girl (someone may even know them by the name of the startup as osmosix) now turned out to be part of Cisco and changed its name to CloudCenter.

Since I did not find anything here about this platform, and I only work with it now, I decided to tell you briefly what it is, if there is interest, I can tell you next time and how to cook :) I’ll start from far away ...



The origin of the term Cloud computing is not known for certain. The word “cloud” is often used by scientists to describe a large accumulation of objects that visually look like a cloud from a greater distance and describe any group of something there that does not imply a detailed description in this context. The term “cloud” began to be used when referring to platforms for shared computing, and the popularization of the term can be traced back to 2006, when Amazon.com introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud.

Today, “clouds” are the result of the evolution and application of existing IT technologies and paradigms, and at the moment there are many providers of cloud technologies. The largest of which are: Amazon, Azure, Google, IBM, HP, VMware and many others. So it’s not a problem for the user to choose their own taste and color, as they say, what suits most their needs and capabilities, but at the same time, it requires knowledge of how to operate with the chosen cloud and how to use each cloud correctly to achieve the best result. It would seem, how to figure it all out and what to do if you just want to drop your upstream stack into a faster cloud, having very basic concepts about it? Answer: Use Cisco CloudCenter!



Cisco CloudCenter (we usually shorten it to C3) is essentially a unique platform with centralized management, which right out of the box allows you to safely and efficiently start deploying your chosen stack of technologies and data in any cloud from those supported by cloud providers, for which there are already 19, and also You can also deploy to a hybrid cloud when part of the infrastructure is in private mode, and the other part is in public access.

The current version of C3 is 4.8, it makes it very rational to simplify the complexity of deployment and essentially separates administrators who can completely control the capabilities of user groups (who, what and where) through system rules and tags, and actually users who can easily from the internal market or independently deploy simulated structures into any accessible cloud without delving into their features, and on the fly perform an assessment of productivity and determine the price. Using the internal settings, you can specify a number of rules, for example, how many additional virtual machine nodes to run, and in which cloud, depending on the budget, time of day, region and load level. All this is automatically balanced without the subsequent involvement of the user.

All the power and beauty of CloudCenter in the visual GUI, which directly in the browser with several drag and drop allows you to express rather complex structures and logical relationships, and do it as quickly and efficiently as possible.



Through modeling, a profile (json file) is created that can be exported / imported, in which a logical relationship between the structural elements will be made and, through a cloud-specific orchestrator, will be performed in the best possible way in the right cloud using “best practice”, so to speak.

C3 has a REST API using which you can make various integrations and manage the system from the console, so to speak, DevOps should really fall in love with this system :) I already :) setting up clouds and regions is very simple, setting up user groups, sub-mode is also supported users, you can share both access to the clouds and permission to deploy to different environments. In addition, you can configure triggers that, for example, will help curb negligent developers who start an expensive multi-core instance in the cloud and leave home and forget to turn it off ... You can set up plans by which to indicate where and after testing you need to migrate, that is, after developers give the go-ahead that the next version is ready for testing, it migrates to the test environment (possibly to another cloud) and after passing the tests (bam, bam and into production!

In the latest version, support for the so-called BROWNFIELD machines appeared, that is, say you already have a data center with vCenter, you can easily deploy C3 there and take control of already deployed virtual machines. Excellent integration with Cicso UCSD, Cisco ACI and all third-party products like different IPAMs or turbonomic ones, for example. Dockerization is natively supported (our docker is all!) Jenkins and Pupet with Chief (not, well, how could it be without them? :)) Finally, a short video:


If you are interested in something else about CloudCenter - feel free to ask, I'm really not a magician and just learning :) but I’ll try to answer all questions.