emma Technologies at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference this week revealed it has added an ability to add existing VMware environments, Kubernetes clusters and cloud instances to its cloud operations platform by simply providing access to an account.
Dirk Alshuth, chief marketing officer for emma Technologies, said the Brownfield Onboarding capability makes it possible for IT teams to unify the management of hybrid IT environments in a way that ultimately reduces costs. Instead of requiring a separate framework for managing each unique stack of IT infrastructure that has been deployed, the company’s platform makes it possible to employ one control plane to manage them all, he added.
That capability also makes it simpler to manage hybrid IT environments where more application services spanning multiple platforms have become more integrated, he added. The emma platform facilitates that integration by including its own network fabric to provide a higher level of abstraction for integrating platforms.
Once an existing account is connected, the emma platform inventories infrastructure resources across the entire estate. Rather than automatically ingesting every resource the moment an account is connected, emma uses an audit-based workflow that allows teams to selectively import infrastructure into a specific project without modifying any infrastructure.
It’s not clear at what pace IT teams are moving to unify the management of hybrid IT environments but in uncertain economic times there is always pressure to reduce costs. The challenge is many IT teams become emotionally attached to tools they have already mastered so resistance to change can be high. The issue, of course, is as more platforms are used to deploy applications, few organizations can afford to hire a separate IT team to manage each platform.
The need to integrate the management of platforms around a single control plane might also become a more significant issue when artificial intelligence (AI) agents are expected to be able to invoke services spanning what are becoming highly distributed computing environments.
The pace at which IT teams are moving to converge the management of IT platforms will naturally vary from one organization to the next. Each provider of an IT platform invests significantly in management frameworks as part of an effort to keep IT teams loyal to them. If there is a single control plane, it becomes a lot easier to swap one IT infrastructure platform or cloud service out for another.
In the meantime, IT teams should assume that the volume of applications being deployed on IT platforms is about to exponentially increase as it becomes simpler to write code in the age of AI. Unfortunately, the overall size of the IT team tasked with managing IT platforms is not likely to increase so the challenge becomes finding a means to manage IT environments at a level of scale that not too long ago would have seemed unimaginable.
Ultimately, it might be only a matter of time before the management of those IT environments is unified. The issue between now and then, however, will be determining how to manage a diverse range of new and legacy platforms that each have their own unique management frameworks.
