(May 1, 2018, By William Fellows, Research Vice President, 451 Research)
Huawei has a raft of management tools used by different groups that have the same functionality but different names. Now it is seeking to reconcile many (including its carrier and enterprise management tools) into the Huawei CMP (cloud management platform), which the company is positioning as its primary hybrid cloud and cloud management platform. It’s also developed (and is curating) a portfolio of services to enable enterprises to migrate into cloud-native deployments.
The 451 Take
Huawei’s challenge is to bring its carrier, consumer, enterprise and cloud offerings together to deliver the digital platforms or backbones for transformation that will support its customers’ futures. Huawei is betting that these intelligent, connected futures will all need to take advantage of AI, IoT, video, big data and more. CMP will provide a consolidated and consistent management environment for managing the hybrid cloud assets that will help support this. It’s like the classic Asian noodle soup: Huawei offers a choice of ingredients that need to be combined for the meal. We want the bowl – a full stack for all scenarios.
CMP
The CMP provides unified management of heterogeneous resources across multiple datacenters and allows for use of multiple cloud services. It has an open architecture and an integrated security service. It currently supports bare metal, vSphere, Hyper-V, IBM Power VC, Red Hat OpenStack, Red Hat RHEV, and AWS via a range of plug-ins, adapters, drivers and scripts (with Alibaba Cloud to follow, and potentially Google Cloud). It is enabled for FusionSphere, but does not initially support Huawei’s own public cloud.
It offers resource planning, monitoring and management; resource pooling (to create low-performance, HPC and HA resource pools, for example); resource allocation; and auto deployment. The CMP provides native APIs to take advantage of the full features of heterogeneous resources (avoids lowest-commondenominator problem), as well as unified management and allocation of resources (supporting differentiated application support), and provides full lifecycle services on Huawei resource pools. Crucially, it has a resource-discovery and -tagging environment. It is microservices-based, enabling customers to add their own services. It is not based on OpenStack.
The CMP has a WYSIWYG service catalog that comes with 26 types of standard cloud services (e.g., block storage, ELB, snapshot, VM, etc.). It has over 100 IaaS and PaaS offerings on top, and additional services can be published to the catalog. It provides an auto-deployment and orchestration engine for applications atop a unified cloud management environment.
The CMP console can configure and deploy integrated security services, such as firewall, cloud IPS, database audit, web protector, cloud UMA and SIEM. The CMP is loosely coupled, which enables customers to ‘dock’ with ITSM, ITOM, billing and general services such as single sign-on and LDAP. Management functions are also productized as HiCloud by the carrier group and within FusionCloud in IT. The CMP includes ManageOne interoperability suite components from FusionCloud.
FusionBridge
FusionBridge is Huawei’s hybrid cloud enablement offering (announced in 2017), supporting eight services and standard OpenStack APIs. It enables automatic cross-cloud (public/private) network connections, with uniform images, resource view and service catalog across them. Huawei’s Cascading OpenStack mechanism enables inter-cloud image conversion and automatic synchronization, while its vApp templates can deploy private cloud applications on the public cloud.
FusionBridge is based on Huawei’s FusionCloud private cloud. It diverts services from the private cloud to the public cloud for hybrid cloud deployment. The eight IaaS available include ECS, EVS, VPC, EIP, VFW, SEG, IMS and IAM. Each service uses the same console in public and private clouds to provide a consistent service experience. In addition to inter-cloud communication through an overlay network, FusionBridge also supports cross-cloud DR and a storage hierarchy.
Using FusionBridge, front-end services are deployed on the public cloud to support large-scale internet access. They use the security service system provided by the public cloud for security protection. Back-end and core services are deployed on the private cloud to prevent data leaks. Various services are provided, such as automatic interconnection between clouds and cross-cloud VPCs, with unified network security groups and firewalls. Service vendors provide the VPN or Direct Connect service to ensure communication quality, security and reliability. FusionBridge supports the ability to replicate services from the private cloud to the public cloud to take advantage of elastic capacity expansion. Backups on the public cloud can be copied to enterprises for data restoration, or be used on the public cloud to restore services. Huawei’s been using FusionBridge internally now for six years – Entel Chile and two Italian telcos are FusionBridge customers.
Migration to cloud-native
The key ingredients here are Kubernetes, the Istio service mesh for microservices (Huawei’s implementation is called ServiceComb, which is now an Apache Incubator project) and serverless. ServiceComb comes from Huawei’s Cloud Service Engine, which is provided for enterprises using Huawei Cloud and is applied to ServiceStage, the application management platform of Huawei Cloud. It provides application framework code generation, service registration and discovery, service configuration management, service monitoring, and service-invocation tracing. It is compatible with microservice frameworks such as Spring Cloud. Huawei says the IT applications used by its 180,000 employees, its communications technology applications, and its consumer applications running on its smartphones all run atop the container, microservices and cloud middleware PaaS.
The Cloud Service Engine includes a microservices framework, compatibility with Spring and Dubbo, Mesher (a commercialized service mesh), and the ServiceComb framework.
Huawei points to 16 application services it has to simplify enterprise migration into cloud, including application orchestration, cloud service engine, software repository for containers, applications operations management, APM and cloud performance test service microservices; blockchain service, API gateway, distributed database middleware, distributed message services and distributed cache service middleware; Kubernetes container engine and cloud container instance; and FusionStage and FunctionGraph serverless services.
Huawei offers several ways to migrate enterprise applications to cloud: lift and shift (no changes), using cloud middleware, application containerization, modernization (to microservices or SaaS), using its Open API gateway and using its FunctionGraph serverless platform. Huawei also has a CloudMount service for datacenter migration services for telecom operators to migrate from private cloud to public cloud.
Competition
Huawei is benchmarking CMP against Red Hat CloudForms (its ManageIQ acquisition) and IBM Cloud Management. Indeed, Red Hat is now seen as a key competitor for Huawei in many areas of cloud computing. We think the combination of CMP, FusionBridge and the migration tools also stack up against VMware’s HCX and vRealize hybrid management portfolios.
Other cloud management platform vendors include HPE OneSphere, Micro Focus Hybrid Cloud Manager, CA Cloud Service Management, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, DXC Technology’s Agility, Accenture Cloud Platform, Capgemini Cloud Choice, Atos Canopy, Fujitsu Cloud Services Management, Cisco Cloud Center, AWS Cloud Management Tools, Google Stackdriver, Alibaba Cloud Monitoring & Management, and Oracle Management Cloud. Independent multi-cloud and hybrid cloud management vendors include RightScale, Scalr, Vapor IO, Cloudamize, InContinuum, RackN, CloudBolt, DivvyCloud, Cloudify, Embotics, Morpheus Data, Abiquo, Platform9, Quali, Accelerite, Turbonomic, Evident.io, Appcara, CloudHealth, CloudCheckr and BetterCloud.
SWOT Analysis
Strengths
The converged CMP is loosely coupled and microservices-based, enabling customers to add their own tooling and services and avoiding the ‘single glass of pain’ problem.
Weaknesses
Huawei will need to overhaul its branding and messaging in order to drive awareness of its converged offerings. Huawei CMP will need to become the all-in-one cloud management platform of record and be available as a single SKU.
Opportunities
As the world goes hybrid IT, one goal for Huawei in 2018 must be to get its hybrid offering understood and established. Huawei has a strong hybrid story. No one else makes their own chips, servers, storage hardware and software stack – and uses all of it for a private/public cloud offering internally and through partners. Huawei should be explicitly referencing this as a virtue and differentiator.
Threats
Huawei believes it has a differentiated approach in its CMP with pre-integrated security, but has yet to articulate or credential this sufficiently. While CMP is microservices-based, enabling customers to add their own services, it is not based on OpenStack.
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Source: Huawei Enterprise Blog
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