Beyond CMDB: Cloud Services Inventory Management

Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB) has long served as the backbone of IT services management. It served reliably as organisations used traditional practices of rolling out changes in a carefully orchestrated manner.  However, with cloud services ranging from VMs to containers and serverless, and with increased focus on agile processes, there is a fundamental shift needed for inventory management. Will the traditional CMDB suffice the modern hybrid IT needs ? In this post, we will touch upon the topic of cloud services discovery and inventory management and how it has changed in the multi cloud era.

The limitations of traditional CMDB

The move to cloud and eventually to multi cloud has created some significant challenges in using legacy CMDB technologies.

• Cloud services are diverse and dynamic. Discovering and keeping the state of these services doesn’t fit traditional CMDB approach. Various cloud services from different providers and the network topology that spans multiple clouds creates new set of relationships. The traditional CMDB products cannot handle them easily
• The onset of agile methodologies and DevOps along with the increasing use of global scale is making the management of cloud services more dynamic. CMDB cannot handle data collection and management of dynamic services seamlessly. Thus, posing challenges to using these technologies in the multi cloud era
• The self service nature of cloud and newer cloud services coming out on a constant basis adds significant challenges to using legacy CMDB technologies

Beyond CMDB

The multi cloud world requires a different approach to inventory management. Something that involves continuous discovery, the ability to parse and handle the states of dynamically changing cloud services. Thus, the need to handle different types of cloud services and cloud providers requires a more modern cloud inventory product. CoreStack’s Cloud discovery and Cloud inventory management helps customers be well prepared to handle modern day cloud inventory management needs. By using a connectorless model, CoreStack makes it easy to discover cloud services across multiple cloud providers. And, CoreStack’s Cloud resource inventory maintains inventory items along with category across platforms, accounts, regions and regional groups. These two powerful features are available in CoreStack platform along with governance related features to make the platform core component of any multi cloud strategy.