Use case

See how a fictional company uses Cloud Management Platform (CMP) to model its teams and manage their infrastructure

  2 minute read  

Example: Yoyodyne, Inc.

Let’s look at the fictitious company “Yoyodyne” to see how it makes use of CMP’s core objects to manage their infrastructure.

When the yo-yo craze revitalized, Yoyodyne became a household name. Now they run a booming business selling yo-yos both online and off. Because their computing infrastructure became fragmented and complicated, they adopted CMP to streamline it and make it easier to use.

Yoyodyne develops their website at their Portland headquarters. They have a VMware vCenter with two clusters: one for development and another for production. Two teams are responsible for maintaining the website: a principal “Dev” team and another “QA” team. The QA team is responsible for testing and deploying the website to production, so they need access to both clusters, but the Dev team only needs access to the development cluster.

To enable this workflow in CMP, Yoyodyne started by creating a resource handler that connects to their vCenter. With this done, CMP could discover all of their preexisting VMs and enable them to be managed from within CMP.

To enable ordering of VMs, Yoyodyne created two environments that used their vCenter resource handler:

  • A “Development” environment that exposes their development cluster and the VM images that the developers need
  • A “Production” environment that exposes their production cluster and just their production images

The order forms for each environment were customized by changing the environment’s parameters to give the “Development” environment more ordering flexibility than the “Production” environment, which has strict VM-size requirements. See Order form customization for details.

To give Yoyodyne’s teams access to these order forms, they added two groups of users to CMP: “Developers” and “QA”. The “Developers” group was given access to the “Development” environment, and the “QA” group was given access to both environments.

Diagram of Yoyodyne’s environments, groups, and access.

By modeling Yoyodyne’s teams and business rules in CMP, their employees now have simple and controlled self-service access to Yoyodyne’s infrastructure. CMP’s automation means fewer mistakes are made, less time is spent creating or managing VMs, and Yoyodyne’s infrastructure becomes more valuable.