Summary: CenturyLink rolled out Cloud Application Manager, a platform that enables organizations to deploy and manage multiple CenturyLink and third party infrastructure resources from a single unified portal and consolidate functions such as billing, managed services and support into a single service provider experience.
Details: With the use of this platform end users can deploy any kind of CenturyLink infrastructure service – its public cloud, private cloud, bare metal hosting and colocation – along with third party cloud resources. Right now, AWS and Azure are supported. There is a SaaS version of Cloud Application Manager and an appliance that can be installed on-premise or in colocation environments. A lot of the underlying technology was brought in-house through the acquisition last year of ElasticBox. ElasticBox built technology that automated a lot of the configuration and provisioning tasks that tools like Chef or Ansible take care of. The goal was to enable literally ‘code and load’ and optimize applications across multiple cloud environments. CenturyLink had been building this technology in-house and released a multi-cloud management product – Runner – prior to this acquisition. Management told us last year that ElasticBox is more advanced and that ultimately the capabilities would be integrated. Self-service or a service managed by CenturyLink and supported by managed services and consulting are available to the customer.
More details: On top of managing infrastructure, end users can deploy managed services – Managed Services Anywhere – from CenturyLink across any of these environments. Notably, it can do this for on-premise infrastructure as well. Monitoring, patching and remote administration is currently available.
Managed third party cloud: CenturyLink is taking a slightly different pathway to managed third party cloud. Rather than tackling it on a standalone service basis, CenturyLink is moving directly to integrating it as an additional product sku within its existing customer-facing interface. Cost optimization and billing management is a focus, but within the context of balancing massive-scale clouds against CenturyLink-hosted infrastructure services.
Angle: CenturyLink has put a lot of thought into how it wants to approach a world where applications and workloads are likely to sit in multiple infrastructure environments based on a number of different variables. The complexity creates a need for managed services and management of the application cycle, in addition to finding the optimal performance and cost levels. Infrastructure is going to be about finding the best-fit for each individual workload and service providers of various shapes and sizes very often don’t have every piece or angle covered. CenturyLink is trying to drive right into that opening and a platform approach with the supporting infrastructure and network to fit the pieces together gives it a chance to build something that the market is looking for.