Morpheus Empowers Platform Engineering Through Unified Orchestration of Hybrid Clouds, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure Automation

By: Brad Parks

Greenwood Village, CO, Dec. 09, 2021 — Morpheus Data, the hybrid cloud application orchestration company, wraps up a record-breaking 2021 with $15M in incremental investment and releases v5.4 of the platform to simplify how platform engineering teams enable continuous infrastructure automation for developer self-service.

Morpheus has grown organically since its inception in 2015, having never taken external funding.  Named a leader by major analyst firms, the company has several hundred customers using its platform to streamline and govern the provisioning of VMs, containers, and public cloud services.  This new investment will accelerate growth in 2022 and support a 50% increase in headcount as Morpheus expands geographic coverage and increases funding for channel initiatives.  

The need for developer enablement has driven demand for self-service provisioning; Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75% of large enterprises will build self-service infrastructure platforms to enable rapid product innovation, up from 15% in 2020. Research also suggests that 70% of existing I&O personnel will shift to DevOps and Platform Engineering teams in that same time frame. Morpheus v5.4 accelerates these projects and reduces the impact of skill gaps with new features that enable:

  • Faster service provisioning via hybrid cloud enhancements for on-premises technologies like VMware and public clouds like AWS, Azure, and GCP
  • Building, managing, and consuming Kubernetes clusters including Morpheus Kubernetes or 3rd-party Kubernetes stacks like OpenShift, Rancher, and Tanzu
  • Consolidated execution of infrastructure-as-code and infrastructure automation with enhanced integration and control of Terraform and Ansible scripts

‘Enterprises today need to reduce operational silos and enable internal software development teams to move faster,’ says Brad Parks, Chief Marketing Officer at Morpheus Data. ‘Our vision is to simplify the consumption of hybrid clouds, Kubernetes, and automation tools within a single unified orchestration platform.’

Enhancing hybrid cloud support to reduce the need for platform-specific skills

The rapid adoption of public cloud is in large part a reflection of how painful it has been to create a private cloud with platforms like VMware. Legacy tools such as vRealize Automation (vRA) have tried to enable self-service but many enterprises are moving away from vendor-specific tools like vRA in favor of an agnostic approach.

Morpheus v5.4 has extended integration into VMware with a complete management overlay for NSX-T as well as enhancements for vSphere and vCloud Director making it the most robust orchestration platform for VMware customers including the ability to:

  • Automatically on-board items from VMware Content Library and re-syncs them regularly to keep virtual machine images and templates up to date.
  • Enable multi-tenant vSphere and NSX environments so service providers can securely extend services to clients from a single VMware cluster.
  • Integrate with the latest VMware vCloud Director (vCD) 10.2  including support for vCD specific NSX objects and operations.

The latest Morpheus release also brings the Google Cloud integration up to full feature parity with the AWS and Azure integrations plus includes support for new AWS and Azure regions.  Morpheus has also enabled purchasing of the platform and associated services within the AWS and Azure marketplaces; this can streamline procurement and simplify deployment for enterprise IT leaders.

Extending Kubernetes integration to consolidate VM and Container management

As enterprises shift from VM to Container-based applications, research shows that 62% of organizations are worried about a lack of Kubernetes expertise within IT.

Morpheus v5.4 simplifies Kubernetes management by including a free built-in CNCF certified Kubernetes distribution that can be deployed to any cloud.  Customers can also enable push-button deployment of third-party distributions from within the Morpheus catalog leveraging no-code integration into dozens of common IT tools.  The platform also enables IT operations teams to perform many cluster management tasks direct from the Morpheus interface without having to become fluent in command line operations via Kubectl.

Eliminating silos for infrastructure-as-code and configuration management

Many organizations have tried to embrace GitOps style operations but struggle to operationalize technologies like Terraform and Ansible at scale due to cost and complexity. Both HashiCorp and Red Hat offer management tools for these open-source projects however they can be expensive and are narrow in scope.

Morpheus v5.4 provides role-based access control, job scheduling, and catalog execution of Terraform scripts and Ansible playbooks including the ability to attach phase-based automation to resources provisioned via Terraform. This eliminates the need for standalone tools like Terraform Enterprise and Ansible Tower and extends the power of automation to IT users who may not be experts in the underlying scripting tools.  

To learn more about how Morpheus can help your organization request a personalized demo and cloud management assessment.

About Morpheus Data, LLC

Morpheus Data is the market leader in hybrid cloud application orchestration, serving hundreds of enterprises, public sector organizations, and service providers globally.

The Morpheus software platform gives customers a customizable self-service application provisioning catalog that can span dozens of on-premises hypervisors, private clouds, and public clouds. Its persona-based feature set meets the needs of Platform Engineering, Security, Application Development, and Finance teams seeking to modernize applications comprised of bare metal, VMs, containers, and public cloud platform-as-a-service services.

With more built-in integrations and native functionality than any other platform, customers can standardize workflows, reduce tool sprawl, and unify processes across different teams and technologies.

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