Deployed cloud services, both on-premise and in hyperscale clouds, generate vast amounts of status metadata – which often goes unused. However, this metadata contains valuable information and can be used, either manually or via policies, to your advantage by grouping services and managing their life cycle more intelligently.
But what exactly is metadata?
Cloud Management Metadata
Metadata is data associated with a workload. It’s not in the code; it’s information that tells us more about how a piece of data has been used. Applied to Virtual Machines (VMs), Containers and software, it can give us a lot of detail about their overall usage, performance, etc..
Let’s say we can get valuable metadata details on 3,000 VMs. Not only can this information help manage them all, but when extracted, that data can be used to create policies that are vital for cloud management control.
This is possible via a ‘Cloud Health Dashboard’, analogous to a Network Operation Center control panel, which – like the meters and dials in an airplane cockpit – gives you a complete visual overview of your environment.
With one of these dashboards in your cloud environment, you can see every detail about how everything is performing – enabling you to monitor the complete health of all your application workloads, whether they are on Bare-metal, Virtual Machines, or Containerized.
Not only does this help you stay updated in real-time, it allows you to respond effectively if something goes wrong and turn unforeseen circumstances into something you can predict.
Benefits Of Analyzing Cloud Metadata
Metadata allows you to respond, adjust, and make small operational changes, like moving one workload from one server to another, or even from one cloud to another – as well as manage, set policies, and monitor your physical and virtual infrastructure resources and the [cloud-native] application workloads running on them.
There are many tangible benefits too. The main one is the vast cost savings you realize by not putting workloads on the ‘wrong’ data center resources, or in a not right-sized hyperscale public cloud instance type – which is why many businesses are now deploying their code and applications cloud-native. The more resource infrastructure you have in use, the more running costs you incur.
But, through the use of the metadata generated by the cloud services subscribed to, you can see precisely how much you need to dial down (or increase) resource capacity to generate the highest efficiency and ROI.
And… exciting news.
InContinuum is currently developing our own policy-based intelligence module, with a NOC-like health dashboard, which will give you all the cost, quota and budgetary advantages and abilities derived from analyzing metadata. CloudController Advisor will allow users to freely review and act upon metadata to tune their infrastructure to excellence.
Stay tuned. It’s coming.
Contact us today to see how we can help you orchestrate and futureproof your cloud infrastructure.