Last year, Fujitsu launched its first open source project, Open Service Catalog Manager (OSCM), for service providers, IT departments and end users to manage and track the cost of provisioning cloud-native applications.
It is, essentially, a platform to manage cloud services and build marketplaces where all of the major cloud service providers from VMware to AWS to Google Compute can list and manage their offerings. IT managers can then shop for and provision cloud services, as well as track and monitor their organizations’ cloud use and purchasing.
A CIO, for example, can see an overview of the services a company consumes, who authorized them, do SLA comparisons, and create other reports.
It also offers a registry of technical services for service providers such as AWS, VMware, Salesforce, and Office 365, that provides everything a service needs to provision an instance.
The goal is to make subscribing to cloud resources – regardless of the vendor or service type – “as easy as buying a videocam from an Internet shop,” said Uwe Specht, senior manager at Fujitsu, in his talk at LinuxCon Europe last week.
Companies are desperate for such a software solution as they increasingly turn to public and hybrid cloud services to deliver products and services.
Fujitsu believes that by open sourcing its software, it can lay the foundation for an industry-wide, vendor-neutral platform for provisioning cloud services.
“As far as we know there is no other open source project that is really for a multi-service catalog,” Wolfgang Ries, CMO of Fujitsu EST, said in the session. “This was built as a single-pane-of-glass, self-service catalog for any type of IT service in your organization.”
OSCM is similar in function to Murano, OpenStack’s open source application catalog, but with a broader scope because it integrates with all service offerings and isn’t limited to IaaS, Ries said.
Ries also raised the possibility of using OSCM as a front end for Cloud Foundry’s Service Broker API. Fujitsu, a platinum sponsor of CNCF and a silver sponsor of Cloud Foundry, has been involved in the Cloud Foundry Service Broker API working group and aims to allow OSCM to leverage the Cloud Foundry Service Broker API.
OSCM has been seven years in the making at Fujitsu, and has seen several iterations before the company released it as open source in 2015. The version they released represents the solution that best meets its customers’ needs for a provisioning catalog system, Specht said. Fujitsu can bring this history and knowledge to the open source community to create a foundational technology for provisioning across cloud providers.
But first, they must build the project’s community. In the past year OSCM has gained 20 contributors on GitHub – largely comprising Fujitsu developers – has processed 1,400 pulls, and has amassed 200 users in the Docker registry where users can download a container with a basic OSCM installation. They are actively recruiting more contributors to help grow the project.
For more information on the project and to contribute visit: http://openservicecatalogmanager.org/ui/
