When I first met Torsten Volk from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) I was attending the DevOps Enterprise Summit (#DOES2018) in San Francisco. We did a fun video and blog post based on some of my initial observations from being a month on the job. Fast forward 4 months and Morpheus has had a tremendous Q4 plus we’re taking off like a rocket in the first part of 2018. Why? I’d like to think it was their new marketing guy, but the fact is the Morpheus is aligned with where the puck is going.

I’ve written before that the founding engineers at Morpheus were designing for their internal own use which led to a design center that I’ve described recently as ‘self-leveling’. No matter what automation tools, platforms choices, application frameworks, or day 2 ops activities that an enterprise has in place Morpheus will layer on top to help enable frictionless service delivery. We don’t force IT Ops to put round pegs in square holes… instead, we’ll conform to your choices to help you master your cloud destiny in your way.

Drum roll please “the top 10 priorities for containers and DevOps are…”

Torsten and the research team at EMA recently completed some in-depth customer-focused analysis on the priorities around containers and DevOps which included multi-cloud automation and the need to span bare metal, VM, container, and serverless options. Here were the high-level priorities that emerged.

You can download the full report here and dig into each of these 10 priorities as well as a description of what it takes to become a ‘digital attacker’. According to Torsten, “Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) named Morpheus an EMA Top 3 vendor due to the product’s ability to tie together the DevOps toolchain, IT operations solutions, and private and public cloud resources.”

What’s the Morpheus angle in container discussions?

At inception, Morpheus was architected to leverage docker as the core provisioning element for cloud services. The design goal was to simplify orchestration for applications which resulted in innovative cross-host linking and persistent storage capability on top of a very user-friendly interface and full fidelity API.

As Morpheus evolved, we found most enterprises were not ready for containerized architecture so we built-in VM and Bare Metal orchestration on top of our already container-optimized base. This differs from legacy tools which have limited container features ‘bolted-on’ to VM-centric architectures. The result? All workloads get access to the same environments, networks, security groups, etc. enabling seamless orchestration of apps, infrastructure, tools, and teams. This ensures a futureproof and unified approach to deployment across bare metal, VMs, containers, PaaS, and even serverless application stacks which are starting to emerge. It also gives VMware customers a very clean path to running VMware automation in a consistent way in any cloud along with a risk-free path to containerization.

Most enterprises are heterogeneous and want to avoid tool silos or architectural lock-in while at the same time enabling developer teams to ‘bring your own tools’ (BYOT) and take advantage of the latest and greatest options. By using Morpheus as a standardized provisioning engine, they can focus on DevOps build velocity, not tool management.

Don’t all roads lead to Kubernetes?

The end goal is to streamline deployment of applications… it’s about the app, not the platform. If a unified orchestration tool like Morpheus with its built-in container scheduler can provide the features you need as well as best-in-class multi-cloud management, cost optimization, and DevOps automation at a lower cost with less tool sprawl then you should consider it. That said, Morpheus also integrates with Docker Swarm and Kubernetes container schedulers and picks up where these tools leave off (self-leveling). Features include:

Integration with docker repositories for easier management of container build pipeline.

More in-depth monitoring than native K8s and unique auto-scaling features

Day 2 Integration with load balancers, IPAM, Identity Management, and ITSM tools enables a complete policy driven tool for provisioning and presenting applications end-to-end from Dev to Production

To learn more I’d encourage you to set up time for a demo with one of our solution architects and see we can help you become a digital attacker.