CIOTechOutlook >> Magazine >> May - 2014 issue

CliQr: Bringing to the Forefront an Application Centric Cloud Approach

By

As the cloud computing phenomenon continues to grow, enterprises have been forced to choose between portability and manageability when it comes to migration tools that help their organizations get to the cloud. CIOs lose sleep over the process of selecting a cloud for their workloads in a way that doesn’t leave them locked-in or unable to manage their day-to-day operations across multiple cloud environments effectively. What’s needed is an out of the box approach which assumes that the cloud can be adapted to conform the application in question, instead of the traditional methodology where the applications were morphed to suit the demands of an individual cloud.

Leveraging this unique point of view is CliQr Technologies, headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Through their flagship product suite, CliQr CloudCenter, the company aptly calls its approach “application-centric” cloud management. “With this approach, applications would be able to move fluidly to and between clouds, and clouds would have to alter the way they provide their best practice resources and compete to provide the best environment,” explains Gaurav Manglik, CEO and Co-founder of CliQr. The product is the brainchild of VMware veterans, Manglik and Tenry Fu, CTO and Co-founder of CliQr, who observed that large incumbent vendors fall short and that it takes a truly application centric approach to realize the open potential of the cloud.

Solving Critical Pain Points

For example, one common cloud migration approach is a script-based technique that prioritizes manageability at the expense of portability. With this approach, the client arbitrarily picks a cloud, writes scripts, and then migrates the application to the cloud. This effectively locks applications into a specific cloud, a precarious position to be in with such an immature cloud market where prices and features change constantly.
Similarly, a second type of tool uses virtual machine images that give great portability, but can create a manageability headache as many cloud-specific images need to be created, and maintenance can be a big hassle. Add to that the complexities of multi-tiered applications that require multiple machines that need to be configured to talk to one another independent of the environment where the image was captured, and it quickly becomes clear why this approach falls short for anything beyond the most trivial of enterprise applications.
These approaches assume that it is the application that needs to change in order to run on the cloud. “But what if we turn this thinking on its head? What if we operate as if it is the cloud, and not the application that has to adapt?” Questions Manglik.
“With this approach, applications would be able to move fluidly to and between clouds and clouds would have to alter the way they provide their best practice resources and compete to provide the best environment,” he adds.
CliQr has made this possible by encapsulating the infrastructure needs of an application into a cloud-agnostic profile which is then interpreted by a back-end tailored for each cloud, embedding best practices for resource provisioning. The result is unmatched portability while still providing a single pane of glass where an administrator can actively manage large number of applications, clouds and users in one environment. The CloudCenter has been built to allow both manual and policy-based governance to determine which user can use which application on any specific cloud, amongst a host of other customization options. “Because of the portability CloudCenter provides, applications can be fluidly moved to different cloud environments as needed for different use cases or changes in the cloud marketplace,” points out Manglik.
Riding on the backbone of the application-centric cloud management approach, CliQr believes that overall it could provide the necessary shift away from dependence on a single cloud vendor. By allowing applications to move natively between clouds, it offers enterprises the freedom to do without modifications through coding and creating cloud specific VM images. This also ensures that the client obtains the best use of the dynamic provisions for the application without the encumbrance of performance overheads. Moving forward, the CliQr team, under the guidance of Manglik, today strives to make the promise of cloud computing more attainable to organizations of all sizes while actively tackling concerns of time intensive re-coding and vendor lock-in.


On The Deck

CXO Insights

Traditional IT Organizations Embracing Digital...

By Pankaj Srivastava, Innovation and Strategic Technologies, Tata Motors

Evolve Your Digital Architecture Stack

By Bhaskar Dey, Assistant Vice President Digital Services and Strategy, Blueocean Market Intelligence

Embracing Change - Cloud Adoption in Financial...

By Damodaram (Damu) Bashyam, Managing Director & Head of Technology, Consumer Banking, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Facebook