Intro: Morpheus Automation

Part of my writings will focus on integrations with a CMP called Morpheus. This is available via the website https://www.morpheusdata.com. The purpose of this post is to give a background on what this brings to the table, specifically how I will integrate multiple infrastructures, tools, and code to provision and manage my workloads. While many postings will be centered around this CMP, I hope others not familiar with the product will still find value in the guides posted here.

So What Is It? What Does It Do?

Morpheus is a Cloud Management Platform (CMP). I’d describe it as the glue between your stuff. It connects my clouds (on-prem/off-prem) with ITSM, config management, and a slew of other tool sets I have to automate and manage my operations. Spin up a VM? Done! Containers? Yep! IaaC? Sure thing!

In my lab, I use Morpheus for the repeatability it offers and ease of reduced interfaces I have to connect to. Sure, I still have to log into those applications on occasion, but really not often after initial configurations.

Being a Cloud Management Platform, one would hope a product ties into as many clouds as possible. This certainly is the case with Morpheus. I can connect to any public or private endpoints I desire (including physical servers as well). Taking that further I carve up the same cloud resources as “groups” and grant access to individual users, businesses, or business units; The true premise of multi-tenancy. Once I have my groups defined, I can reference them for analytics, pricing, and auditing purposes.

Taking it Further!

So the integrations are too expansive to touch on individually in a single post. It’s important to note however, that all integrations with Morpheus are handled via native API calls and no plugins are required. One of the nightmares of IT Operations past was the struggle of keeping your platforms current and ensuring your plugins still worked. I’m sure we’ve all seen a vCenter plugin that was no longer compatible and no longer saw active development. Thanks to the nature of how these are handled, I can easily add and remove systems as I demo them.

Over time I will work through setting up things like Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Veeam, and F5 appliances in my lab. These are some of the integrations in Morpheus, but are pretty widespread systems within IT Enterprises. Guides will follow the installation, usage, and even integrations within my CMP to further enhance experiences around self-service.

Looking forward take taking you all down the rabbit-hole! First project coming soon!