Sudo Show 5: Open Source Cloud Management Tools

Sudo Show episode 5 kicked off a new arc on cloud architecture, and we used it to dig into open source cloud management tools with Brandon doing most of the heavy lifting since this is squarely his world.

We start with the mess that is multi cloud reality. Most companies aren’t running one cloud or one virtualization platform, they’re juggling three different hypervisors, a couple versions of OpenStack, and workloads scattered across AWS, GCP, and Azure, sometimes without IT even knowing about all of it. Brandon walks through why platform agnostic tools like Ansible and Terraform matter so much here, and then gets into the actual cloud management platforms he tested for the episode: Mist, Cloudify, and ManageIQ. He breaks down what separates a true CMP from a glorified inventory tool, and shares hands on results from spinning up and tearing down cloud resources with each one.

ManageIQ gets the spotlight toward the end since Brandon’s been working with it for years going back to its days as the upstream for Red Hat CloudForms, and he makes a solid case for when you’d reach for something with that much depth versus something like Mist if you’re just getting started.

This one ties directly into how I think about infrastructure automation and the kind of hands on tooling I try to bring into my Linux teaching at JCCC.