We’ve been talking a lot about the features of Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac Business Edition (previously known as Parallels Desktop for Mac Enterprise Edition), and I want to dig in a little more to be clear on all of the features from the new Parallels Desktop 11 Pro Edition that you also get in […]
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Mirantis and CoreOS are partnering on Kubernetes integration with OpenStack
Pure-play OpenStack vendor Mirantis has teamed with CoreOS to integrate its distribution of the open source cloud software with Tectonic, CoreOS’ commercial Kubernetes distribution.
Tectonic blends Kubernetes, an open source container deployment management service, and the CoreOS software portfolio in an integrated package, including a management console for workflows and dashboards, an integrated registry to build and share Linux containers, and additional tools to automate deployment and customize rolling updates. It runs on-premises or in public and private clouds.
The two companies said the move would improve support and manageability of containers running on OpenStack and bolster their mutual hybrid cloud capabilities.
“Mirantis and CoreOS share a vision of helping DevOps teams create better software faster. Putting Kubernetes on top of OpenStack gives them flexibility in how they build their applications, letting them innovate quickly,” said Mirantis chief marketing officer and co-founder Boris Renski.
“We are thrilled to be working with Google and CoreOS, and look forward to hearing more from them about how enterprises can leverage containers with OpenStack at OpenStack Silicon Valley.”
The move comes nearly half a year after Mirantis announced it would partner with Google to get vanilla Kubernetes integrated with its OpenStack distribution and double down on support for containers more broadly, efforts that have seemingly accelerated since Google announced the official 1.0 launch of Kubernetes last month.
“Now that Kubernetes is production-ready, companies using Tectonic and Mirantis OpenStack can have a Google-like infrastructure at their fingertips,” said Alex Polvi, chief executive of CoreOS. “Mirantis possesses a deep understanding of open source software and their commitment to the open source ecosystem around OpenStack is second to none. It was natural to work with Mirantis to help customers see the benefits of Kubernetes on OpenStack.”
Oracle is adding support for Docker to Solaris
Oracle said this week that it would bring Docker support to Solaris, becoming the latest legacy software vendor to add support for the open source Linux container technology.
While Solaris has had support for Linux containers in the form of ‘Solaris Zones’ (Oracle’s virtual machine technology) for nearly a decade, the move will see Oracle enable Docker to be deployed within those ‘Zones’ (VMs).
The company also said it plans to make some of its software – Oracle WebLogic Server was the only one specifically mentioned – available for deployment and testing as full Docker images on Solaris.
“Today’s announcement really gives developers the best of both worlds – access to Oracle Solaris’ enterprise class security, resource isolation and superior analytics with the ability to easily create containers in dev/test, production and cloud environments,” said Markus Flierl, vice president, Oracle Solaris Core Technology.
“Integrating Docker into Oracle Solaris will make that even easier and will help customers benefit from highly integrated compute on premises and in the cloud,” Flierl said.
Laurent Lachal, senior analyst, infrastructure solutions at Ovum said the move is a win-win for those planning to move to more cloud-native technologies like OpenStack and Linux containers but still depend heavily on different components of the Oracle stack.
Oracle is the latest legacy software vendor to open up to Docker.
Late last year Windows announced it would support the container technology in Windows Server 2016, around the same time IBM announced it would provide a Docker-based container service through Bluemix, the company’s platform as a service offering.
Given how embedded Oracle is in large organisations the move could see Docker gain more traction in the traditional large enterprise, potentially a big win for the young open source container project.
HP is buying Stackato to boost support for Linux containers
HP is to acquire ActiveState’s Stackato business for an undisclosed sum, which the company said would give a boost to its hybrid cloud strategy.
Like HP Helion Development Platform, Stackato’s platform as a service is built on Cloud Foundry and offers robust support for Docker, which is gaining the lion’s share of attention in the Linux container world. It offers deployments on a range of cloud infrastructure including AWS, VMware, OpenStack, HP Cloud and KVM.
HP said the move would strengthen its hybrid cloud strategy, which largely puts application catalogues, workload automation, Cloud Foundry and OpenStack front and centre.
“The Stackato PaaS solution strengthens the HP Helion portfolio and reinforces HP’s commitment to delivering customers open source solutions that help accelerate their transition to hybrid clouds,” said Bill Hilf, Senior Vice President, product and service management, HP Cloud. “The acquisition reinforces HP’s focus on driving Cloud Foundry as the open standard cloud native application platform.”
After the acquisition closes, which is expected to occur sometime in Q4 this year, HP will integrate Stackato into the Helion Development Platform.
The strong support for Linux containers will help HP build on its hybrid cloud strategy. Containers are useful in part because they are extremely portable and can run on pretty much any infrastructure, a useful feature when it comes to lifting and shifting workloads and application components in heterogeneous infrastructure environments. In an interview with BCN earlier this month Xavier Poisson, vice president of HP Helion in EMEA said Linux containers are increasingly at the core of cloud-native app development – so anything that can boost the company’s support of containers could make it more competitive.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is putting Linux containers at the core of its definition of ‘cloud-native’ apps
The Linux Foundation along with a number of enterprises, cloud service providers , telcos and vendors have banded together to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in a bid to standardise and advance Linux containerisation for cloud.
The newly formed open source foundation, a Linux Foundation collaborative project, plans to create and drive adoption of common container technologies at the orchestration level, and integrate hosts and services by defining common APIs and standards.
The organisation also plans to assemble specifications to address a “comprehensive set of container application infrastructure needs.”
The members at launch include AT&T, Box, Cisco, Cloud Foundry Foundation, CoreOS, Cycle Computing, Docker, eBay, Goldman Sachs, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Kismatic, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Switch Supernap, Twitter, Univa, VMware and Weaveworks.
“The Cloud Native Computing Foundation will help facilitate collaboration among developers and operators on common technologies for deploying cloud native applications and services,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation.
“By bringing together the open source community’s very best talent and code in a neutral and collaborative forum, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation aims to advance the state-of-the-art of application development at Internet scale,” Zemlin said.
The central goal of the foundation will be to harmonise container standards and techniques. A big challenge with containers today is there are many, many ways to implement them, with a range of ‘open ecosystems’ and vendor-specific approaches, all creating one heterogeneous, messy pool of technologies that don’t always play well together.
That said, the foundation expects to build on other existing open source container initiatives including Docker’s recently announced Open Container Initiative (OCI), with which it will work on building its container image spec into the standards it develops. Google also announced that the foundation would henceforth govern development of Kubernetes, which reached v.1 this week, over to the foundation.
“Google is committed to advancing the state of computing, and to helping businesses everywhere benefit from the patterns that have proven so effective to us in operating at Internet scale,” said Craig McLuckie, product manager at Google. “We believe that this foundation will help harmonize the broader ecosystem, and are pleased to contribute Kubernetes, the open source cluster scheduler, to the foundation as a seed technology.”
Ben Golub, chief executive of Docker said while the OCI offers a solid foundation for container-based computing many standards and fine details have yet to be agreed.
“At the orchestration layer of the stack, there are many competing solutions and the standard has yet to be defined. Through our participation in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, we are pleased to be part of a collaborative effort that will establish interoperable reference stacks for container orchestration, enabling greater innovation and flexibility among developers. This is in line with the Docker Swarm integration with Mesos,” Golub said.
CenturyLink has open sourced a batch of cloud tools
CenturyLink has open sourced a number of tools aimed at improving provisioning for Chef on VMware infrastructure as well as Docker deployment, orchestration and monitoring.
Among the projects open sourced by the company include a Chef provisioning driver for vSphere, Lorry.io – a tool for creating, composing and validating Docker images, and imagelayers.io – a tool that helps improve Docker image visualisation in order to help give developers more visibility into their workloads.
“The embrace of open-source technologies within the enterprise continues to rise, and we are proud to be huge open-source advocates and contributors at CenturyLink,” said Jared Wray, senior vice president of platforms at CenturyLink.
“We believe it’s critical to be active in the open-source community, building flexible and feature-rich tools that enable new possibilities for developers.”
While CenturyLink’s cloud platform is proprietary and developed in house Wray has repeatedly said open source technologies form an essential part of the cloud ecosystem – Wray himself was a big contributor to Cloud Foundry, the open source PaaS tool, when developing Iron Foundry.
The company has also previously open sourced other tools, too. Last summer it punted a Docker management platform it calls Panamax into the open source world, a platform is designed to ease the development and deployment of any application sitting within a Docker environment. It has also open sourced a number of tools designed to help developers assess the total cost of ownership of multiple cloud platforms.
It’s possible that containers and container management tools like Docker will be the single most important thing to happen to the data center since the mainstream adoption of hardware virtualization in the 90s. In the past 12 months, the technology has matured beyond powering large-scale startups like Twitter and Yelp and found its way into the data centers of major banks, retailers and even NASA. When I first heard about Docker a couple years ago, I started off as a skeptic. I blew it off as skillful marketing hype around an old concept of Linux containers. But after incorporating it successfully into several projects at Spantree I am now a convert. It’s saved my team an enormous amount of time, money and headaches and has become the underpinning of our technical stack.
If you’re anything like me, you’re often time crunched and may not have a chance to check out every shiny new toy that blows up on Github overnight. So this article is an attempt to quickly impart 10 nuggets of wisdom that will help you understand what Docker is and why it’s useful.
Docker is an engine designed to help you build, ship and execute applications stacks and services as lightweight, portable and isolated containers. The Docker engine sits directly on top of the host operating system. Its containers share the kernel and hardware of the host machine with roughly the same overhead as processes launched directly on the host machine.
But Docker itself isn’t a container system, it merely piggybacks off the existing container facilities baked into the OS, such as LXC on Linux. These container facilities have been baked into operating systems for many years, but Docker provides a much friendlier image management and deployment system for working with these features.
When Docker was first released, many people compared it to virtual machine hypervisors like VMWare, KVM and Virtualbox. While Docker solves a lot of the same problems and shares many of the same advantages as hypervisors, Docker takes a very different approach. Virtual machines emulate hardware. In other words, when you launch a VM and run a program that hits disk, its generally talking to a “virtual” disk. When you run a CPU-intensive task, those CPU commands need to be translated to something the host CPU understands. All these abstractions come at a cost: two disk layers, two network layers, two processor schedulers, even two whole operating systems that need to be loaded into memory. These limitations typically mean you can only run a few virtual machines on a given piece of hardware before you start to see an unpleasant amount of overhead and churn. On the other hand, you can theoretically run hundreds of Docker containers on the same host machine without issue.
All that being said, containers aren’t a wholesale replacement for virtual machines. Virtual machines provide a tremendous amount of flexibility in areas where containers generally can’t. For example, if you want to run a Linux guest operating system on top of a Windows host, that’s where virtual machines shine.
Download the whitepaper to read the rest of the list of 10 Things You Need to Know About Docker
Whitepaper by Cedric Hurst, Principal at Spantree
Rancher is developing container-based IaaS software
Rancher Labs, a startup developing Linux container-based infrastructure-as-a-service software, has secured $10m in a series A round of funding, which it said would be used to bolster its engineering and development efforts.
Rancher Labs, which was started by CloudStack founder Sheng Liang and Cloud.com (which was acquired by Citrix in 2011) founder Shannon Williams, offers infrastructure services purpose-built for containers.It also developed a lightweight Linux OS called RacherOS. “We wanted to run Docker directly on top of the Linux Kernel, and have all user-space Linux services be distributed as Docker containers. By doing this, there would be no need to use a separate software package distribution mechanism for RancherOS itself,” the company explained.
The company said that as technologies like Docker become more popular in production mode so do other requirements around things like networking (i.e. load balancing), monitoring, storage management, and other infrastructure requirements needed to stand up a reliable cloud workload.
“Containers are quickly becoming the de-facto large-scale production platform for application deployment,” Liang said.
“Our goal is to provide organizations with the tools needed to take full advantage of container technology. By developing storage and networking software purpose-built for containers, we are providing organizations with the best possible experience for running Docker in production.”
The company’s goal is to develop all of the infrastructure services necessary to give enterprises confidence in deploying containers in production at scale, and it plans to use the funding to accelerate its development and engineering efforts.
Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing director at Nexus Venture Partners, one of the company’s investors said: “Software containers have dramatically changed the way DevOps teams work, becoming an essential piece of today’s IT infrastructure. The team at Rancher Labs recognized the technology’s potential early on, along with the pain points associated with it.”
While the technologies and tools to support Linux containers are still young there seems to be growing volume around using them for production deployments; one of the things that makes them so attractive in the cloud world is their scalability, and the ability to drop them in almost any environment – whether bare metal or on a hypervisor.
John Engates was in London for the Rackspace Solve conference
Linux containers have been around for some time but only now is the technology reaching a level of maturity enterprise cloud developers are comfortable with, explained John Engates, Rackspace’s chief technology officer.
Linux containers have been all the rage the past year, and Engates told BCN the volume of the discussion is only likely to increase as the technology matures. But the technology is still young.
“We tried to bring support for containers to OpenStack around three or four years back,” Engates said. “But I think that containers are finally ready for cloud.”
One of the projects Engates cited to illustrate this is Project Magnum, a young sub-project within OpenStack building on Heat to produce Nova instances on which to run application containers, and it basically creates native capabilities (like support for different scheduling techniques); it effectively enables users and service providers to offer containers-as-a-service, and improves portability of containers between different cloud platforms.
“While containers have been around for a while they’ve only recently become the darling of the enterprise cloud developers, and part of that is because there’s a growing ecosystem out there working to build the tools needed to support them,” he said.
A range of use cases around Linux containers have emerged over the years – as a transport method, as a way of quickly deploying and porting apps between different sets of infrastructure, as a way of standing up a cloud service that offers greater billing granularity (more accurate / efficient usage) – the technology is still maturing and has suffered from a lack of tooling. Doing anything like complex service chaining is still challenging with existing tools, but that’s improving.
Beyond LXC, one of the earliest Linux container projects, there’s now CoreOS, Docker, Mesos, Kubernetes, and a whole host of container-like technologies that bring the microservices / OS ‘light’ architecture as well as deployment scheduling and cluster management tools to market.
“We’re certainly hearing more about how we can help support containers, so we see it as a pretty important from a service perspective moving forward,” he added.
Microsoft is bolstering its hybrid cloud appeal on the one hand, and going head to head with other large incumbents on the other
Microsoft revealed a series of updates to its server and cloud technologies aimed at blending the divide between Azure and Windows Server.
The company announced Azure Stack, software that consists of the architecture and microservices deployed by Microsoft to run its public-cloud version of Azure, including some of the latest updates to the platform like Azure Service Fabric and Azure App Fabric – which have made the architecture much more container-like.
Built on the same core technology as Azure but deployed in a customer’s datacentre, the company said Azure Stack makes critical use of among other things some of the company’s investments in software-defined networking.
The company also said it worked a number of bugs out of the next version of Windows Server (2016), with the second preview being made available this week; the net version of Windows Server will include a number of updates announced last month including Hyper-V containers and nano-servers, which are effectively Dockerised and slimmed-down Windows Server images, respectively.
Azure Stack will preview this summer and Windows Server 2016 is already available for preview.
The company also announced, Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), a hybrid cloud management service that supports Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMware, and OpenStack.
For Microsoft the updates are a sign of a significant push into hybrid cloud as it looks to align it’s the architecture of its Windows Server and Azure offerings and help customers manage workloads and operations in a multi-cloud world. Interestingly, by taking the Azure architecture directly to customer datacentres it’s effectively going head-to-head with other IaaS software vendors selling alternatives like OpenStack and CloudStack – Dell, HP, Cisco, Red Hat, IBM and so forth – which is in some ways new territory for the cloud giant.