
Overview
In this article we will deploy the CloudForms appliance in the Azure cloud. CloudForms is a cloud management platform based on the opensource project manageiq. Red Hat bought manageiq a few years back and opensourced the software. Originally it was designed to manage VMware but over the years has expanded to many additional traditional as well as cloud platforms. You can use this article as reference for both CloudForms and ManageIQ.
CloudForms can connect to many cloud providers such as RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization), VMware, Hyper-V, OpenStack, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Engine (GCE) and Azure. Large organizations don’t have one cloud but many and in addition typically have on-premise, off-premise as well as public. All of these various platforms creates a lot of complexity if not managed right. CloudForms can create a bridge between traditional (mode 1) and cloud native (mode 2) workloads, offering applications a path to switch between these modes. In addition, CloudForms allows an IT organization to act as a cloud broker between the various public platforms. Finally CloudForms can be used to automatically deploy and manage applications across the various cloud platforms. Businesses have choice in platform, flexibility and speed while IT can manage it all centrally applying common policies or rule-sets regardless of where workloads are running.
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