Cloupia – Brief Note

Yesterday I had a briefing with Cloupia around their announcement of the Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller V2.2 today. Here is my brief note on the call:

Cloudpia is providing a “manager of managers” as we used to call it: a system that layers on-top of various virtualization and cloud technologies to give a birds-eye view and control over everything. Their focus is on providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) management. In the demo, Cloudpia worked with infrastructure based on VMWare, Microsoft Hyper-V, “Citrix Xen,” “RedHat KVM,” Amazon EC2, Rackspace, and “Cloud Storage.”

Their technology relies on the APIs provided by the sub-systems instead of doing their work themselves. This is fine, of course, as their focus is on providing that spanning layer over everything instead of providing the raw platform needed for the “low level stuff” of cloud computing. As such, functionality focus is on

To that end, there is a self-service user interface for going through the workflow of request cloud-based services and doing the reporting and management of said resources. A user comes in, requests an instance, walking through the request workflow including seeing the amount they’ll be charged. Once the instances are setup, the user treats it like any other network-bound virtual guest, SSH’ing or Window remoting in.

Admins are given an interface to configure the clouds used, monitor usage, and setup the various policies that users are bound by. Admins can also setup various catalogs of resources and different images for users to pick from.

All of this is done in, I believe, a Flex-based UI, which gives it a snappy UI and nice dancing charts, including heat-maps of resource usage.

They have a feature called “CloudSense Analytics” that offers to closely monitor resources used and do auto-scaling (up or down, in or out, conceivably) appropriately. There is some basic CMDB integration: generating an XML file with changes to state across the clouds, requiring extra work to fully integrate with existing CMDBs, of course.

When I asked about customers and users, Cloupia said that they have interest from enterprises and some service providers. In particular, several providers are looking to use Cloudpia as their public IaaS offering.

Are you looking for a “cloud of clouds,” or do you prefer just using one technology for your cloud stack?