CloudBolt Grows Hybrid Cloud Management Capabilities with GCP

CloudBolt Software has rolled out the Summer '21 release of its hybrid cloud management platform, providing more capabilities to help organizations optimize cloud deployments as well as expanded support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

With the Summer '21 release, CloudBolt has enhanced the platform's cloud cost optimization and FinOps capabilities. Additionally, the extensibility of the platform has been improved with a new API framework that enables organizations to programmatically interact with CloudBolt services.

CloudBolt has had support for Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) alongside capabilities for GCP. However, the platform did not previously have GCP support from a cost management perspective, according to Rick Kilcoyne, CTO of CloudBolt.

"Currently, we can support our GCP customers with cost and usage reporting and management, which is a big lift for them," Kilcoyne told ITPro Today. "Feature parity across clouds will come soon, although not many customers are consuming all the major clouds at the same level and thus do not need the parity."

CloudBolt Boosting Hybrid Cloud Management for Cost Optimization

CloudBolt's platform can support both multi-cloud and hybrid cloud platforms, according to Kilcoyne. 

It enables organizations to see usage and spend, set budgets and find optimization opportunities across clouds. CloudBolt is also developing reports and dashboards that will go across clouds in more depth, Kilcoyne added.

With the Summer '21 update, the platform has also gained expanded budgeting capabilities for FinOps. With FinOps, the basic idea is to create financial discipline and processes around cloud operations.

"Setting up budgets and comparing the actual spend against it is currently very difficult for cloud users," Kilcoyne commented.

There are still many organizations that budget cloud spending with just basic spreadsheets, he said. With its Summer '21 update, however, CloudBolt is providing a new budgeting capability where organizations can set monthly, quarterly or annual budgets. They can also set thresholds and get alerts in email, Slack and Microsoft Teams when those thresholds are crossed in actual spend.

CloudBolt Extends Hybrid Cloud Management with API Update

There are many ways that organizations can use the CloudBolt platform—one is by integrating it with other services for IT service management such as ServiceNow, or a configuration management technology like Ansible or Terraform.

With the Summer '21 update, CloudBolt is introducing a new API framework that makes it easier for enterprises to consume most of the CloudBolt functionality in any other platform.

Before the update, organizations had to use both the CloudBolt User Interface and Command Line Interface and thus go through multiple steps, Kilcoyne said.

"Now they can consume CloudBolt in other platforms without opening the CloudBolt platform," he said.

As part of the CloudBolt update, the company is also introducing new pluggable modules for its OneFuse no-code integration service. Kilcoyne said the goal with pluggable modules is to accelerate the time for updates. Prior to the new release and pluggable modules, OneFuse customers had to update the entire application just to get a new integration enhancement, he said.

"With pluggable modules, we can go in and just update a part of a specific module and not the entire appliance, which takes time and introduces risk," he said.