Cloud, without workload management, doesn't work

When you want cloud, you just turn it on (or off), right? That’s the beauty of the eminently controllable datacentre-driven services-centric cloud computing model of application processing and information storage, right?

Well yes, but no, it’s kind of not quite like that, at least not at the coalface.

A major issue within cloud is workload management i.e. the science behind controlling what data (processing, analytics, storage, other) are being executed where.

In a (cloud computing) world where containers and microservices form a potentially more intricate landscape and computing topography than we have ever known at any time in the past, the need to manage (data and application processing) workloads across shared cloud resources (on-premises, hybrid and public cloud infrastructures) is key to building enterprise compute that will actually scale.

This (above) is not the exact branded company mantra or corporate mission of Univa, but it could be.

The Chicago, Canada and Germany headquartered firm is provides on-premise and hybrid cloud workload management solutions for enterprise HPC customers.

Univa has now contributed its Navops Launch (nee Unicloud) product to open source community as Project Tortuga under an Apache 2.0 license.

While the software is largely used in enterprise HPC environments as of now, Project Tortuga is a general purpose cluster and cloud management framework with applicability to a broad set of applications including high performance computing, big data frameworks, Kubernetes and scale-out machine learning / deep learning environments.

Tortuga automates the deployment of these clusters in local on-premise, cloud-based and hybrid-cloud configurations through (and here’s the crucial bit) repeatable templates.

The technology in Tortuga can provision and manage both virtual and bare-metal environments and includes cloud-specific adapters for AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with support for bring-your-own image (BYOI).

Gary Tyreman, president and CEO of Univa explains that the built-in policy engine allows users to dynamically create, scale and teardown cloud-based infrastructure in response to changing workload demand.

Management, monitoring and accounting of cloud resources is the same as for local servers and the open source project is available now at https://github.com/UnivaCorporation/tortuga