Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Solutions

Consumers of IT today are looking for more than an operating system to be deployed. They are looking for applications and services that deliver value to the consumer and to the business in a click. Snow realizes that there is no single provider that can meet all the requirements for deployments of applications and PaaS. Therefore, Snow has focused on providing broad support for many industry leading solutions and providers.

Configuration Management Integrations

Commander^® is tightly integrated with Chef, Puppet, Ansible and more. This allows you to leverage existing investments in best of breed configuration management solutions. Commander has built-in workflow steps for these systems that allow you to incorporate them into your post-deployment workflows.  You can also build Service Catalog Blueprints that directly use Chef, Puppet, and Ansible to offer complete application stacks.  For Developers and Power-Users that require more flexibility, they can select the Classes, Groups, Roles, Recipes, and Run-Lists they would like to use.   

Native Commander Post Deployment Features

Out of the box Commander allows you to orchestrate workflows with pre-canned intelligent steps like; Wait for a VM to get an IP, Execute Script, Execute SSH Command, Run Programs in Guest OS, Copy and Create files on the Guest OS, Power Controls, Send emails, among many others.  For scripting, Commander allows you to use any scripting language you want, be it PowerShell, Perl, Shell, .Net or anything else. This allows you to leverage any previous automation investments you have made.

Integrating with 3^rd Party Workflow Engines

If you have already built automation in other workflow engines, Commander can call these systems and pass information to them via API or CLI. Customers have leveraged systems like Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, vCloud Orchestrator, and many other Open Source workflow engines.

Deploying a PaaS Solution

Public cloud providers like Amazon and Azure provide a wide variety of services and technologies in their cloud offerings today. These can include storage, compute, load balancers, firewalls, databases, and security services.  Each provider has a declarative way to describe a PaaS solution leveraging all or some of these technologies. AWS uses Cloud Formation Templates and Microsoft Azure uses ARM Templates. Snow Commander can publish these templates to allow automation and orchestration of these public cloud offerings in Snow Commander’s Self Service Portal.