Let’s agree on a few things right out of the gate…

First. with respect to CloudOps, the major driver of public cloud usage is new app development. Hybrid IT and multi-cloud brokering is the new service provided by IT; those orgs who don’t do it well are stuck with shadow IT issues from rogue developer teams. Second, let’s turn attention to DevOps, where developers care about apps… not infrastructure. These teams live in the world of Agile and Open Source where faster releases and better tooling rules the day. Lastly, the whiteboard scene from the Silicon Valley season one finale ranks among the funniest 5 minutes of TV ever.

Everybody with me so far?

So, it stands to reason that the only thing everybody has in common is the application. The application is the face of today’s business… in virtually every industry and geography.

For CloudOps it’s about where the app lives, for DevOps it’s about how it’s deployed, and for Pied Piper it was a compression platform. The application is the center of the universe… yes, you need cost control and governance as well as automation and deployment flexibility but without an app-centric point of view, the rest of it is noise.

That’s why I’m here to advocate Middle-Out Cloud Management… and not just Richard Hendricks style middle-out. I’ll do you one better with Bi-Directional Middle-Out. Now while I’d love to think that the 2×2 wizards over at Gartner would come out with a middle-out MQ I’m not holding my breath. However, if you look at this webinar on How to Choose a Cloud Management Platform (CMP) then you can see where I’m headed.

There are a set of governance and provisioning table stakes for CMPs as well as emerging demand for cost optimization, however, it’s critical to take a step back and ask why cloud in the first place. The objective of the organizations looking at all of these tools is to meet digital disruption head on through the development of applications and changes in process to fundamentally change engagement with customers and markets.

Morpheus was designed middle-out

So yes, of course, I’ve ended up here but I want to highlight why an application-centric design center can help reduce tool sprawl and may be better aligned with where your enterprise is looking to go.

First, let’s look at the North-South or on-prem and off-prem capabilities. You don’t want a server, VM, or container… your ultimate goal is a functional config for an application. That’s why we go beyond and actually provision the OS, database, web server, and other app components on the right tier, in the right boot order, and provide tools to help companies evolve over time as they modernize both traditional and micro-services applications.

As multi-cloud orchestration platform, we have the governance tools as well as analytics to help optimize costs but the point is Morpheus starts with the application in a 100% infrastructure agnostic way… deploying, migrating, and elastically scaling the application on any OS, any platform, any database, and any cloud.

Next, we can dig into the East-West development and deployment pipeline. With our history as a DevOps oriented deployment tool for IT practitioners, we eat our own dog food. Our engineers actually use Morpheus to develop and deploy Morpheus. It’s our application, and as we think middle out we look to the left and integrate with code repositories and binary artifacts that come from builds as well as to the right to the last-mile and ‘day 2’ operations required to run an application… load balancers, backups, monitoring, and logging are all native to Morpheus. If you are looking at cloud management tools to serve your app dev teams you should ask your tool provider how much they practice what they preach.

I’m still surprised at how some tools are narrowly focused on one slice of the cloud and DevOps world given how tightly coupled these two inexorable forces are so I give you middle-out as a construct to re-think tool choices and/or possibly your TV binge-watching. Now if only I could proxy a Weissman score for lossless cloud management tools…

If you want to set up a demo to discuss your application needs let us know or if you want to hit me up on twitter to comment shoot me a DM @MorpheusDude.