HCL Software has made its DevOps product portfolio cloud-ready, and has introduced HCL SoFy, a cloud-native platform for creating tool solutions, and HCL Now, a cloud-native-as-a-service offering.
The work is the result of a major investment HCL made across its entire product portfolio to modernize its solutions for the cloud, according to Alex Mulholland, chief platform architect at HCL Software. “We wanted to take the software our clients have already made investments in and make it easy to use” in modern cloud environments, she explained.
The key to this effort, Mulholland said, was leveraging Kubernetes and Helm charts. Each product in the HCL Software portfolio has been packaged in containers, with UIs and dashboards, wrapped as Helm charts. “SoFy is the platform that brings the portfolio together as services,” she said. “Each item in the [HCL Software] catalog is already a Helm chart, with pre-reqs all wrapped up with configuration so they run out of the box.”
Because this is based on native Kubernetes, it is cloud-agnostic, providing flexibility for customers to run the software without cloud vendor lock-in, she explained.
SoFy allows customers to look at what’s available and create their own solution packages; those packages can be deployed to a sandbox and include demos and step-by-step instructions for use, Mulholland noted.
HCL Now, the service offering, lets users run the HCL software wherever they want to run it, with access to log files, containers, and more.
HCL SoFy, which encompasses 26 of the company’s products, is available as a 30-day trial, through a one-click install that can be up and running in an hour. Mulholland also pointed out that cloud-native software also helps customers overcome the pain points of version upgrades, as it’s all done behind the scenes.
