Time flies when you're having fun and building great products! Those who have been following CloudCenter (formerly CliQr) know that it's been about 6 months since we were acquired by Cisco. During that time, we've have been extremely busy. Not only was there a lot of normal day to day activities needed to integrate into Cisco's processes and systems, but the team was also working to crank out another great feature-filled release. I happen to be especially proud of this release since I was it's my first release in the product manager role for CloudCenter.

Image: CloudCenter combining both cloud and datacenter in one platform

With my new role comes some great perks like getting to play with the engineering builds right when a new feature is completed. I'm proud to report that not only is CloudCenter 4.6 now generally available, but it's a great, big, first release under the Cisco banner. This release delivers an even deeper integration with Cisco ACI, a more simplified networking model across clouds, and an easier deployment experience.

Deeper ACI integration

CloudCenter first introduced Cisco ACI integration about a year and a half ago-right before CiscoLive 2015 in San Diego. Naturally, after the acquisition in April, one of the first things we set out to do was to deepen that ACI integration and provide more value to our customers. The 4.6 release's vision centered around generally increasing networking flexibility. But also giving users the option to use either existing Cisco ACI objects (endpoint groups, bridge domains, and virtual machine managers) or dynamically create new ones.

The net/net of these new and enhanced ACI features is that CloudCenter with Cisco ACI blows away any other solution to give a seamless experience, no matter if you're using vSphere, OpenStack, Azure Pack, or any other on premise IaaS cloud API. Network administrators gain flexibility in configuration, automation during deployment, and control of what end users are able to do via self-service on demand offerings -all without ANY coding to the ACI API. On the flip side, end users get a more consistent and expedited deployment of their application profile from an easy to use, self-service experience.

Simplified Networking

Since the acquisition, people keep asking us, "are you going to stay cloud-agnostic?" Fortunately, the answer is "Yes" and there is no plan of that changing.  We continue to refine the list of clouds, versions, and regions we support out of the box. And we continue to add enhancements that support a multi-cloud world.. The new "Simplified Networking" configuration works by letting an administrator abstract cloud networks and assign a label based on the network's technical features.

As an end user, all you have to do is provide your business requirement for the application you're deploying. CloudCenter then maps all the technical stuff behind the scenes. Need a "Secure" network in Metapod? CloudCenter will map the application in the background to "Network X". Instead, if the application is landing on AWS, Azure, vCenter, or any of the other clouds we support, the equivalent of the "Secure" network might be "Network Y".

By abstracting each cloud's networks into a business-requirement defined label, it makes end users' life SO MUCH EASIER. Gone are the days when they have to know about the underlying cloud's network capabilities. At the same time, administrators get more control and guarantee that applications are being deployed appropriately though policy.

Deployment Experience

For those old school CliQr users and admins, you'll notice some slick new user interfaces in this release. Sticking with our mantra of "make life easy for users and admins", we added the ability for admins to pre-set and hide certain fields from users on the deployment form, let application tiers be deployed across availability zones within a cloud region, and streamlined the deployment screen flow.

Image: New deployment environment configuration screen

Above you can see the new deployment environment configuration screen. Note the visible and non-visible settings for each field. If I'm an admin, I love this feature because it means I can lock down and hide fields that my users don't need to worry about. Less room for error, less questions from users, and more smooth sailing!

There's a ton more that made it into the CloudCenter 4.6 release and you can find it all in the release notes. In the next 6 months, you can be sure to expect more announcements of our progress, both in feature releases and as we make waves as a new product within Cisco!