What role does the NSX Manager fulfill among cloud services?

The NSX Manager serves as a centralized management component in the NSX-T architecture, fulfilling the role of a controller. It is responsible for the entire NSX environment's configuration, monitoring, and API integration. This component orchestrates the networking and security functionalities of the virtualized infrastructure, allowing for the automation of network provisioning and management tasks.

The NSX Manager establishes communication with the data plane, which comprises the hypervisors, ensuring that the necessary policies and configurations are consistently applied across the virtual networks. It also facilitates integration with cloud management platforms, enabling a seamless operation for network services in multi-cloud environments.

In this context, the NSX Manager is crucial for maintaining the orchestration of virtual networks, security policies, and management capabilities, solidifying its role as a controller rather than a manager or master. The terms manager and policy can refer to various aspects of networking and security but do not specifically capture the primary function of NSX Manager in orchestrating and controlling the logical network infrastructure.