According to the creators, the goal of this project is to make “cloud computing accessible, collaborative, and delightful for developers.”

The sandbox environment can be used for up to two hours at a time, and developers get access to 4 GB of RAM at any time. Once the two hours are up, the workloads are stopped, but developers can recreate them whenever they choose.

Developers can run multiple projects through Acorn. The Pro version offers collaboration features where developers can invite team members, who can then collaborate across multiple applications and environments. It also includes management tools where users can set role-based access control policies. 

Acorn also provides a set of DevOps tools to handle monitoring, logging, secret management, and cloud management. 

There is also a Dev Mode that enables users to work directly on an application while it is running. Changes can be synchronized in real time, debuggers can be added, and logs can be viewed in this mode. 

Projects created in Acorn are saved as Acorn Images, which are OCI-compliant and work with any registry. These images are identical wherever they are deployed, which cuts down errors and configuration issues. 

“Cloud computing has become increasingly complex for large organizations, let alone individual developers and small teams,” said Sheng Liang, CEO of Acorn. “With Acorn, we’ve eliminated that complexity. Users don’t need to be experts in Kubernetes, Terraform, DevOps or AWS to take advantage of the power of cloud computing. Acorn puts the power of the most popular cloud computing solutions at your fingertips. The only question is what you will create from then on.”

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I attended last year’s event and spoke with quite a few executives there to learn what it was all about, and most importantly, how it would help their businesses. Customer centricity is what it’s about now.

Rancher Labs was in the first wave Kubernetes distributions, and has learned what it takes to be more than just a Kubernetes company, Sheng Liang, CEO of Rancher Labs, told me this week.

He explained that Kubernetes is becoming a commodity, offered by all three major cloud providers, making it accessible to all. Rancher offers K3S, a project that Liang said “turns it into a distro suitable for edge… basically anything not in the cloud.’

The company’s multicluster management platform is Rancher, and late last year, the company released a beta of Rio, its application deployment engine designed for DevOps teams.

Going forward in 2020, Liang said Rancher is retooling the management platform to “extend its capabilities to handle huge numbers of clusters, that have to be categorized and managed.” Rancher leverages the service mesh capabilities inside Kubernetes to roll out to smaller numbers, so as not to disrupt all clusters with the rollout. 

The company also will productize its Longhorn container storage solution as part of its Rancher platform. By offering block storage, snapshot and backup, Longhorn will enable you to run stateful applications on Kubernetes, he said. 

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Before k3OS, users of Rancher Labs’ k3s still had to manage the underlying Linux operating system separately, Sheng LIangi, CEO and co-founder of Rancher, told SD Times leading up to the announcement. “We’re combining Kubernetes and our own Linux distribution to manage Linux through Kubernetes,” Liang said. “We treat it as a whole thing. If nodes need to be rebooted, Kubernetes can orchestrate that.” This, he added, decreases the complexity of managing k3s Kubernetes clusters.

k3OS is based on the Ubuntu kernel with tools from Alpine Linux, LIang explained. By combining Kubernetes and Linux, organizations that haven’t been updating the OS because they’re focused on Kubernetes won’t have to worry. “Even rebooting the operating system can cause an outage” in places where Kubernetes and the operating system are decoupled, Liang said. “Kubernetes clusters are supposed to fail one at a time; they’re not meant to be taken down all at once.”

k3OS is particularly well-suited for what Liang called low human interaction platforms, such as edge computing, where resources are constrained. Among the key new features are 10-second boot time that makes k3s immediately available, the enablement of automatic k3s configuration during the boot sequence, and the ability to patch and upgrade the Kubernetes distribution and the Linux distribution through a common set of YAML files, the company detailed in its announcement.

Further, no package manager is required because system services are built into the k3s image; and k3OS supports x86 and ARM64 (Raspberry Pi 3), the announcement said.

The company expects to ship a production-ready product later this year, but said developers interested in trying out the new solution can follow the project at https://github.com/rancher/k3os.

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For instance, Microsoft announced plans to extend its Hyper-V isolation technology in order to power Linux containers on Windows Server. According to the company, developers have faced limitations when it came to running Linux images on a Linux host and Windows images on a Windows ghost. This new announcement is designed to remove the barrier and allow Linux containers to run natively on Windows Server. “Microsoft’s new Hyper-V Linux containers, announced [this week] at DockerCon, and its collaboration with Docker’s LinuxKit and containerd together represent a unique, innovative solution for developers building heterogeneous, hybrid cloud applications,” Scott Johnston, COO of Docker, said in a statement.

Bitbucket Pipelines supports Docker images
Atlassian announced developers can start building applications as Docker containers on its build, test and deployment solution. Bitbucket Pipeline eliminates the need to install additional plug-ins or run separate Docker services with Docker image support. This Docker integration allows teams to run automated tests and build validated apps as a Docker image, build and push Docker images to a registry, and build, tag and push a Docker service in one pipeline.

“By adding support for Docker in Bitbucket Pipelines, Atlassian is delivering modern software development tools and processes for continuous delivery. With Bitbucket Pipelines, there’s no need to switch to another application to use Docker containers for testing software, and no need to juggle permissions and access, or set up build servers,” Nick Stinemates, VP of business development and technical alliances at Docker, said in a statement.

Twistlock announces Twistlock 2.0
Twistlock announced the latest version of its Docker security and container security platform at the conference. Version 2.0 of Twistlock features improved Runtime Radar, and new compliance explorer for large enterprise and government agencies. These additions are designed to stop attacks before they start.

Other features include: embedded secret detection and blocking, certification authentication, Jenkins Pipeline support, and improved file integrity assurance.

Weaveworks monitoring, alerting for Docker deployed apps
Weaveworks announced monitoring and alerting for any Docker deployed application using its Weave Cloud service, which is now available in the Docker store. These capabilities enable a full stack operations for any Docker environment, including Docker CE, Docker EE, Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, and DCOS apps

The new features are available in both Weave Cloud and Weave Cloud Enterprise Edition. These features include: alerting and monitoring with metrics across containers, services, networks, and apps; no configuration setup; and a single operational backplane for apps across Docker, Docker EE, Kubernetes, ECS and DCOS.

Docker Enterprise Edition technology now available from Rancher Labs
Rancher Labs announced that it’s partnered with Docker to integrate technology and support for Docker Enterprise Edition Basic into Rancher’s container management platform.

“Since we started Rancher Labs, we have strived to provide users with a native Docker experience,” said Sheng Liang, co-founder and CEO, Rancher Labs. “As a result of this partnership, the native Docker experience in the Rancher platform expands to include Docker’s enterprise-grade security, management and orchestration capabilities, all of which is fully supported by Rancher Labs.”

Now, Rancher users will be able to deploy Docker Enterprise Edition clusters and take advantage of features like: certified infrastructure, containers, and networking and volume plug-ins.

StackIQ adds support for Docker Community Edition, Docker Swarm
StackIQ added support for Docker with Stacki Pallet, a set of software packages and code that runs on the Stacki Framework. The Stacki framework is a bare metal provisioning platform made by StackIQ.

The new Stacki Pallet runs on Docker Community Edition and it has Docker Swarm mode baked in. Also, the Stacki Pallet lets teams enable the consistency and configuration required for a Docker installation.

“Docker deployments that require consistent performance and high utilization should be run on bare metal,” said Joe Kaiser, director of open source engineering. “The Stacki Pallet with Docker Swarm Mode dramatically eases and accelerate Docker deployments on baremetal, taking the user from bare metal to containers in one step.”

DockerCon 2017 Cool Hacks

At DockerCon this year, Docker featured two apps which came from members of its Docker Captains program, a group of individuals who are contribute much to the Docker community.

The first cool hack was Play with Docker by Marcos Nils and Jonathan Leibiusky. Their app is a Docker playground which can run in your browser. Its architecture is a Swarm of Swarms, running in Docker in Docker instances. This app is completely open source, so developers can run it in their own infrastructure.

The second cool hack comes from Alex Ellis, who built a Functions as a Service (FaaS) framework for building serverless functions on Docker Swarm. Each function runs as a container, but it only runs for as long as it takes to run the function.

FaaS comes with a convenient gateway tester, so developers can try out each of their functions directly in their browser. FaaS is looking for active contributors, so developers that are interested should check out its GitHub repo.

StorageOS releases public beta of developer license
StorageOS released a public beta of its developer license for Docker users. The new public beta gives users access to high performance block storage, storage volumes through Kubernetes and Docker plugins, and management via the RESTful API, CLI or GUI.

StorageOS is a software storage platform which lets developers and DevOps teams build stateful containerized apps with persistent storage, according to its site.

Scality updates Scality S3 Server
Scality announced an update to its Scality S3 Server solution with support for high availability and multiple cloud data backends. The release includes support for AWS S3, In-memory, Scality RING, and Docker Volume. In addition an extended set of storage services are now available with Docker Volume.

“This new Scality S3 Server release provides the simplest on-ramp to object storage. It is cloud provider independent, meaning users decide on the optimal cloud storage option for their data. It is the easiest, most flexible, and scalable way to store vast amounts of unstructured data, and it empowers developers and enterprises to leverage this simplicity for free,” said Giorgio Regni, CTO at Scality.

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Key features include a minimalist OS, automatic configuration, simple setup, reduced footprint, and extensive platform support.

“RancherOS is a minimalist Linux distribution that is perfect for running Docker containers,” said Sheng Liang, co-founder and CEO of Rancher Labs. “By running Docker directly on top of the kernel and delivering Linux services as containers, RancherOS delivers just what you need to build a containerized application environment.”

VMware to acquire Wavefront
VMware is extending its monitoring analytics capabilities with the acquisition of Wavefront. Wavefront is a metrics monitoring service for cloud and modern app environments. VMware announced its attention to acquire Wavefront earlier today.

Wavefront allows users to get operational insights in real-time, discover new ways to address problems, identify bottlenecks, and test algorithms and hypotheses. The company’s cloud-host service ingests, stores, visualizes and alerts on streaming metric data.

“I’m excited about Wavefront joining VMware upon the close of the deal,” said Pete Cittadini, president and CEO of Wavefront. “Today, Wavefront delivers the ultimate streaming metrics monitoring to digital enterprises changing the way they deliver and instrument their clouds and modern applications. I look forward to delivering Wavefront’s innovations to more customers, more extensively, as part of the vRealize portfolio of industry-leading multi-cloud management products.”

OpenBSD 6.1 released
OpenBSD 6.1 is available with significant improvements and new features in nearly all areas of the system. This is the 42nd release of OpenBSD.

OpenBSD 6.1 comes with new and extended platforms, and retired the following platforms: armish, sparc, and zaurus. The release also includes improved hardware support, new support for Linux guest VMs, IEEE 802.11 wireless stack improvements, generic network stack improvements, and installer improvements.

A full list of improvements can be found here.

Sisense releases Sisense Pulse
Sisense, a data analytics company, is introducing Sisense Pulse. This platform uses machine learning technology to analyze and learn data patterns to detect and alert users to anomalies.

According to the company, business users are given the power to automate KPI tracking in a “systematic way.” This lets users be more in tune with their key KPIs, and it gives them the insights they need to take action when an anomaly occurs.

“By continuing to tap into the power of machine learning with the introduction of Sisense Pulse, we are furthering our mission to lead the BI market by making insights easily accessible to everyone,” said Amir Orad, CEO of Sisense. “Businesses today are faced with more pressure than ever to quickly analyze and interpret intensely complex data. There is no longer time to wait for manual reviews and static alerts. To stay competitive, companies need BI and analytics tools that are proactive, intuitive and that enable them to take action in real time. A system that makes its users smarter versus relying on the user’s own guidance.”

More information can be found here.

Kore.ai’s chatbot builder
The conversational AI solution wants to simplify the development of chatbots. Kore.ai recently announced its Bots Platform 2.0, featuring greater intelligence, sentiment analysis, and the ability to perform simple tasks and complex workflows.

“Existing chatbots – and the platform solutions that they are built on – left a lot to be desired in the marketplace in 2016. From our inception we had a different perspective, based on deep enterprise expertise and experience building hundreds of chatbots, on what’s truly needed to turn conversational chatbots into a reality for large companies,” said Raj Koneru, CEO and founder of Kore. “The Kore Bots Platform 2.0, which introduces rich new capabilities, builds on that promise and empowers enterprises with a strong foundation for future innovation.”

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A software container is a way to package software in order for it to run anywhere regardless of the environment. “Everything comes back to being faster and being cheaper than the competition from a core business standpoint. How can you deliver software faster, and how can you make sure you can deliver it in a way that is more cost effective than other competitors in your market,” said Mackenzie Burnett, product lead for Tectonic at CoreOS, a container orchestration platform provider. “What containers have enabled is both an organizational speed in terms of how you deliver software and how you develop software. On the other hand it allows for significant cost savings.”

Containers are not a new phenomenon, but it wasn’t until recently they were made easily accessible to developers. In 2013, the software container platform provider Docker announced a framework that made container technology portable, flexible and easy to deploy. “When Docker started, the focus for Solomon Hykes, founder and head of all technology and product for Docker, was on two areas: The democratization of [containers] and the democratization of the container technology for developers,” said David Messina, SVP of marketing and community at Docker. What Hykes was able to do was separate the application concerns from the infrastructure concerns and make container technology accessible to developers, he explained.

Before Docker, containers were not accessible to developers. “It was actually an obscure Linux stack technology used by operations folks for isolation,” said Messina. The first generation of containers, also known as system containers, were primarily focused on virtualizing the operating system, according to Arun Chandrasekaran, research vice president of storage, cloud and BigData at Gartner. “What Docker really did was ride on the coattails of past innovations and past work and provide a very simple application interface to system containers,” he said.

Today, the interest in containers has become widely popular. According to Gartner, client inquiries show a 300% increase in containers in 2016.

Another reason for this surge in containers is what Gartner calls the digital business. According to Chandrasekaran, more and more businesses are becoming software companies, and they are under more pressure to do continuous software delivery.

“People want to go faster. The whole idea of ‘software is eating the world’ is businesses outside of Silicon Valley need to realize they can be disrupted by teams that adopt new technologies and build applications that can be changed as quickly as customers require changes to be made,” said Alexis Richardson, CEO of Weaveworks, container and microservices networking solution provider.

Docker donates core components of its technology to the industry
In order to help the industry benefit from its technology, and create innovative container solutions, Docker has donated components and ingredients of its platform to open-source foundations. In 2014, Docker introduced the libcontainer, now known as runC, a built-in execution driver for accessing container APIs without any dependencies. The specification and runtime code was donated to the Open Container Initiative in 2015 in order to help create open industry containers for container formats and runtime.

In 2016, the company’s containerd runtime was released as a standalone, open-source project. Just last month the company announced its intent to donate the runtime to the Colud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). According to the company, the runtime and organization’s goals align in terms of advancing cloud native technology and providing a common set of container technology. Docker will continue to invest and contribute to the project. The company is currently working on implementing the containerd 1.0 roadmap, with a target date of June 2017.

“Containerd is at the heart of Docker. We need the project, and we need it to be successful,” said Patrick Chanezon, member of Docker’s technical staff. “Giving it to the CNCF will just expand the community that can collaborate on it.” 

How  to take advantage of a container architecture
Containers are often associated with microservices, a software approach where developers break applications down into small, independent components instead of dealing with one large monolithic application.

“Container technology is an excellent way to implement microservices because what microservices does in a nutshell is allow you to break up your monolithic applications into a set of independent services. Each service can then be deployed, upgraded, maintained and bug- fixed on its own without having to impact the whole application,” said Sheng Liang, CEO of Rancher Labs, a container management platform provider. “Without containers, businesses have to worry about the different environments software has to be deployed in, and packaging the application then becomes a very labor-intensive and time-consuming process.”

According to Liang, because microservices need to be individually packaged, deployed, scaled and upgraded, containers are a nice fit because of the lightweight architecture. It enables continuous deployment, continuous integration, and can cut the build and development time down to minutes.

“More than a revolutionizing approach to software development, containers and microservices enable greater app agility, reliability, portability, efficiency and innovation. Moving away from monolithic app architecture to a distributed microservices-based architecture often leveraging containers means that developers can quickly introduce new features without impacting application functionality and maintaining availability at scale,” said Corey Sanders, director of compute for Azure at Microsoft.

Containers enable agility because they enable developers to build an application one time, run it on any infrastructure, and package everything together in an easily shareable way. In deployment, containers provide a shorter testing cycle by packaging all the dependencies, and enabling consistent deployments, according to CoreOS’s Burnett.

If you are  going to do microservices, there is really no reason not to use containers, according to Rancher Labs’ Liang. However, not all applications are going to be ready for a microservices architecture. “Even if you have a monolithic application, there are still a lot of benefits to using a container because the fundamental benefits are universal packaging and a deployment format that provides consistent runtime,” he said.

Burnett explained that the difference between the architectures is that if you have one giant monolithic application, with myriad dependencies, you typically will have a giant team working on it. With a microservices architecture, you have smaller teams working on separate services that don’t have the same tightly coupled dependencies on one another, he said.

“In either case, the container is the package for the thing you’re replicating. If your architecture is monolithic, you’re going to have a few big clunky boxes to replicate. If your architecture is made of microservices, you’ll have a lot of small boxes that you can replicate independently of each other. Most enterprises have architectures that are a mix of the two, monolithic and microservices,” she said.

However, Microsoft’s Sanders explained that scaling with monolithic applications can be problematic because developers need to deploy more application instances, create new virtual machines or provision new servers. “When combined with testing to ensure that the system works as expected after the changes, scaling monolithic applications can be time-consuming and expensive. This complexity can be exacerbated further when there are resiliency requirements, which is often the case with enterprise applications,” Sanders said.

A microservices architecture is designed to scale independently, providing agile scaling at any point in time, Sanders explained.  

And then there are the situations where applications may not be suitable for containers or microservices at all. “You can’t just take something that is built one way, and change it. Not everything needs to be containerized. It is just a part of what architecture decision is best for your business,” said Burnett.

How do containers differ from virtualization?
If the idea of taking things from an application and isolating them sounds an awful lot like virtualization, that is because it is, according to Betty Junod, director of products at Docker. Junod said that conceptually, virtual machines (VM) and containers are similar, but architecturally they are different.

“If you think about VMs, those are effectively machine instances that were set up by operations to effectively allocate memory resources whereas the packaging that we are talking about here with Docker and containers is in the hands of the developers, and it can run on any infrastructure,” Docker’s Messina added.

In a sense, containers are a lighter weight VM. They are an application packaging format that doesn’t require developers to package the operating system in as well as a VM would, according to CoreOS’s Burnett. “What this means is coupled with container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes you can pack servers in a much better way,” she explained. “A way to think about it is in terms of Tetris. If you aren’t paying attention to what you are doing once you get to the top, you run out of space. If you pay attention, you have to pack Tetris or the pieces much more efficiently [to] effectively use the space,” she said.

However, the real key differences between containers and virtualization are that virtualization typically has been bound to a infrastructure provider, and virtualization up until recently has been expensive and too difficult to make real applications out of components, according to Weaveworks’ Richardson. “Containers are very quick to start, and very lightweight in terms of their capacity consumption requirements,” he said. “There is a possibility that you could build much more realistic applications using containers and get some of the benefits of VM at the same time.”

The three key benefits that make containers more appealing over VM’s include their ability to run on bare-metal infrastructure; their smaller resource footprint; and the ability to bundle application dependencies, according to a recent study from Gartner’s Chandrasekaran, and Raj Bala, research director at Gartner. 

Approaching containerization
There are three entry points to adopting containers, according to Docker’s Junod. They include:

1. Taking an existing application, containerizing the whole thing, and slowly starting to carve pieces off for modernization
2. Taking commercial off-the-shelf applications that are already in-house and containerizing them to be more portable
3. Starting with a new new application

However an organization decides to approach containers, there are some best practices that can help them along the way.

Traditionally a lot of technology adoption requires big top-down initiatives, but containers have a very different process in terms of how organizations typically adopt them, according to Rancher Labs’ Liang. Container adoption tends to start with developers very organically because the benefits are very tangible and simple to use. In addition, businesses don’t have to turn every single application into a container on day one. You can start with one, and eventually migrate everything over. Some applications may be working just fine and not updated very often, so a company can stay with a legacy infrastructure and not implement a container deployment model, Liang explains. “In general, there is a lot of flexibility and freedom in how an organization can adoption container technology,” he said.

According to Microsoft’s Sanders, container-based and microservice architectures take a lot of planning. The first thing business leaders need to do is prioritize their application and services, and figure out which ones are most important to their daily operations. “Applications requiring high availability with fast agile development can benefit most from these new models. Depending on the business goals and time horizons, enterprises can choose from many ways in which to transition to a these modern architectures,” Sanders says.

CoreOS’ Burnett recommends having a small team within the organization to lead the transition. The team starts playing around with the technology, evaluating the technology platform, and acts as a prototype for the rest of the company. “The prototyping does not just include the technology. The team is also prototyping how to build a team, the best practices for training people on the new technology, and how to communicate between teams,” he said.

In order to start using containers right away, Sanders believes a lift-and-shift approach to existing apps may be the best solution.

A lift-and-shift approach allows developers to port applications without having to refactor or deal with extensive code modifications, according to Weaveworks’ Richardson. For example, a lift-and-shift of a small legacy app allows developers to move it to the cloud, make it redundant, and create a sleeping copy so that it has a backup in case the primary app is overloaded, he explained

For teams trying to take the full advantages of a microservices architecture, the best way enterprises go about this is to fully re-architect their applications, according to Sanders. “This development mechanism lends itself well to the distributed, resilient, and agile nature of a microservices-based application,” said Sanders. In order to successfully re-architect an application,  Sanders suggests developers take a gradual approach, identify the components that benefit most from cloud scale and agility in deployment, and rebuild those components first.

“Whether you choose to adopt containers and microservices through a legacy migration, lift-and-shift, a re-architecture, or greenfield, it is always going to come down to the question of how do you make this easy for application developers,” said Richardson.

Gartner’s Chandrasekaran explains sometimes the amount of effort required to retool or refactor a legacy application might not compare to the benefits a company could potentially be getting with containers and microservices. “Organizations have to have a very clear idea of their portfolio and figure out which applications can benefit from the tradition. Secondly, they have to identify what are the metrics and how are they going to measure the status of these projects to figure out if it has been a success initiative.”

One of the biggest challenges organizations will run across is the cultural transition. Containers are relatively new to developers, and the skill sets aren’t all there, according to Chandrasekaran.

“If you really want this to be successful, you have to have a more fluid organization where people are collaborating increasingly with each other, trying to do new things, trying to in some sense break things and willing to learn from those things,” he said “A lot of this movement is going to really come from the willingness of organizations to relook at their skills, relook at their processes and more importantly relook at the culture and leadership, and how they reward and hire people.”

The container toolbelt
Containers are a way to easily package your software, but there is still the matter of existing server, storage, networking and security infrastructure a business needs to consider.

As leaders look to create a container strategy, they need to address operations management, application software installation, infrastructure software installation and management, and physical and virtual server installation. Each one of those different pieces require different tools and approaches to have a successful container transition, according to Gartner’s Chandrasekaran.

Operation management includes scheduling, resource management and monitoring. “Scheduling and resource management are key, as containers allow denser packing of hardware resources than virtualization,” said Chandrasekaran. He recommends looking at tools such as Google’s Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos and Mesosphere Datacenter.  

Since containerization is such a new technology and skill for everyone, CoreOS’s Burnett says it is best to look toward a solution that has an established operationalized knowledge base on how to run containers in production like Kubernetes.

According to Weaveworks’ Richardson, orchestration provides an easy way to discover and maintain containers that you wouldn’t be able to do manually. “You don’t want to be looking at hundreds of machines, or even tens of machines and have to worry about what software is deployed on which one,” he said.

In addition, Chandrasekaran says granular monitoring tools that handle container-level monitoring will help developers identify bottlenecks and failures, as well as pinpoint problems. Scheduling and orchestration will allow users to scale containers and have them interoperate with other parts of the infrastructure.

Application software installation includes activities associated with installing the app software within the containers. According to Chandrasekaran, it is important to maintain the registries that store the software and ensure developers are using the right software. “Without this governance, developers are free to use any application or application infrastructure. Among the enterprise-hosted offerings in this area are solutions from Docker and CoreOS,” he said.

Service management includes activities involving the development and operations of the service such as container runtime and container discovery. Here, traditional operating systems and container formats are used with an operations management process, Chandrasekaran explained. According to Richardson, an operational platform helps complement other solutions because it provides the ability to troubleshoot, diagnose, issues and correlate them with results.

Infrastructure software installation and management includes infrastructure provisioning, configuration and patching functions. “This includes the installation of the underlying operating system that is virtualized to make containers. After installation, the configuring and ongoing patching of the operating system must be performed,” Chandrasekaran said. Chandrasekaran believes users need a continuous configuration automation process to work with containers.

Physical and virtual server installation is provisioning the infrastructure where containers reside. According to Chandrasekaran, enterprises are deploying containers within VMs because of their ability to separate individual containers, and the mature tooling found in the VM world. Over time, however, Chandrasekaran sees more companies taking an interest in developing new container-related tools that are in line with VM management. Serverless technology is an area Microsoft’s Sanders believes is growing. According to him, it allows developers to focus on developing applications, not managing machines or worrying about virtual machines, and in turn boosts productivity.

“The world of microservices and containers is evolving rapidly. There are multiple popular offerings for container orchestration and management. We see this diversity continuing as customer needs continue to diversify,” Sanders said.

Other necessities for containerization include having proper governance and security policies in order to prevent things like malicious code from coming in. Chandrasekaran recommends trusted registries to help monitor container traffic. In addition, Rancher Labs’ Liang says businesses need to implement internal processes to prevent the operations team from looking at things they aren’t supposed to, such as customer data. “Breaches don’t just come from the outside, the come from within the organization too. You want to make sure your security and privacy concerns are solved,” he said.

For networking and storage, you need to have a back-end infrastructure that is agile-oriented, and allows for a more automated process. Gartner’s Chandrasekaran is seeing more people interested in cloud infrastructure because it lessens the pain that comes with hardware management, and allows users to quickly provision and scale infrastructure.

Liang believes cloud infrastructure is important because if you have a system running on a couple of servers in your own data center and you have a bad network connection, it is not going to scale. The cloud can help ensure teams store data reliability, move data from one host to another, handle load balancing problems and solve networking and storage problems.

Additionally, Docker’s Messia believes teams need to have an overall management platform that covers the container lifecycle from developers to operations, and allows Dev and Ops to collaborate.

“Container technology is no longer playing around. It is for real,” said Weaveworks’ Richardson. It is becoming easier and easier for application developers to use this with their favorite tool. 2017 is the year they should start doing it, if they haven’t already.”

The post Controlling software through containers and microservices appeared first on SD Times.

Features include the ability to select from multiple container orchestration frameworks like Docker Swarm and Kubernetes; a cloud-agnostic infrastructure service layer; load balancing and persistent storage services; and the ability to work across cloud and datacenter boundaries.

“Since announcing our beta product less than a year ago, Rancher Labs has experienced incredible demand, as well as received encouraging and helpful feedback and community support for this open platform, which has enabled us to make meaningful enhancements to Rancher,” said Sheng Liang, CEO of Rancher Labs. “Now, with well over a million downloads, Rancher has quickly become the platform of choice for teams serious about running containers in production.”

Quali open-sources plug-in
Quali announced today that it is open-sourcing its plug-ins known as Shells, and making them available through a newly formed developer community.

Quali is a Cloud Sandbox platform for DevOps automation. Along with creating the developer community, Quali is providing product features to empower it, including Python libraries and extended APIs, which will make it easier for developers to create and share new Shells and Sandbox orchestration workflows.

The Cloud Sandbox platform enables development, test, support, partner and sales groups to deliver results and transform the IT infrastructure into purpose-built clouds, designed for DevOps.

“Quali’s extensive Sandbox APIs enable us to make sandboxes part of a fully automated DevOps workflow,” said Moorthy Raju, staff engineer at VMware. “This is critical to our vision of a fully automated, self-service interoperability lab/data center shared by our virtualization and engineering groups.”

The following components are available in the developer community:

• Open-source Quali’s Shell modules under the Apache 2.0 license
• Native support for Python-based shell automation and sandbox workflows
• A full set of northbound Python APIs and libraries for integration with DevOps and application life-cycle tools
• A Developer’s Center website with a registry of all available open-source shells, as well as tools for developers such as tutorials, best practices, samples and videos

New functionality by BlazeMeter gives developers more freedom
BlazeMeter has added new functionality, giving developers the ability to run any combination of Gatling, the Grinder, JMeter, Locust and Selenium tests in parallel through a single unified control language, both locally and in the cloud. Developers can now leverage existing Java Python and Scala language skills, and run any combination of test in parallel.

BlazeMeter’s new technology allows teams to create load and performance tests as brief fragments of code in any text editor, removing many of the barriers presented by legacy tools, according to the company. BlazeMeter tests can be defined using YAML or JSON file formats, and then managed in version control alongside the applications being tested.

The company’s “performance tests as code” format is a domain-specific language that controls test logic and performance thresholds for open-source tools without the need for expertise in the tools themselves. This gives developers or testers greater reach with the tools they already use. Individual small-scoped tests can be run in a targeted fashion or composed along with other tests into sophisticated real-world scenarios at runtime, according to the company.

The full announcement is available here.

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These advances affect how we get information, interact with our devices, make decisions, and even modify how we work. They also leave behind a long tail of legacy code that needs to be kept alive, and often even brought into more modern systems.

All this, of course, leaves plenty of room for innovation, and SD Times has tried to make sense of it all with Companies to Watch. These are startups or young companies—or old companies with new ways of looking at things—working on projects that help advance the industry.

Some of these companies might take root and grow into the next Google, Facebook or Amazon. Others will find a solid niche of loyal customers and thrive for quite a while. Still others, undoubtedly, will have placed their bets on technologies that fail to gain traction, derailing their efforts. That said, in the coming year, these are the companies our editors are recommending you keep your eye on, as great things could be happening.

Are you watching these companies? Have we missed any, in your opinion? Write us at feedback@sdtimes.com.

Slack Technologies
What they do: Real-time collaboration platform
Why we’re watching: With a US$1.12 billion (with a B) valuation from such industry heavyweight investors as Kleiner Perkins and Google Ventures, Slack is used for team collaboration in such diverse places as Heroku, SoundCloud and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Slack’s cofounders have the social street cred, with each having a big hand in building out the Flickr social media platform and the Glitch MMO. Slack is real-time messaging and document sharing, and it connects to tools you use to avoid switching between apps. Notifications such as support requests, code check-ins and error logs are searchable from the central archive.

Pneuron
What they do: Microservices “for the rest of us”
Why we’re watching: This startup has built a software development and execution platform that supports rapid build and deployment cycles. Using the metaphor of the brain, Pneuron’s platform interacts with underlying data and application systems without the need for upfront aggregation and query writing. It calls microservices “neurons” and the container a “cortex,” which controls messaging between neurons. Each neuron is a step in a process, and users can build out neuron networks as simple or complex as needed to solve a problem.

Meteor
What they do: Open-source JavaScript application platform
Why we’re watching: Meteor pulls together a set of core packages designed to work well together, to simplify the development process for reactive application development. Meteor offers Isobuild, a system that enables code to run on the client, in the cloud, and from packages to database APIs. Meteor uses the Distributed Data Protocol to provide “REST for WebSockets,” a protocol for delivering microservice APIs over WebSockets.

Mesosphere
What they do: Reinventing the datacenter
Why we’re watching: The company’s Data Center Operating System (DCOS) is built on Apache Mesos, and can run nearly any type of workload. DCOS spans all the machines in your datacenter or cloud, providing an elastic, scalable way to deploy applications. It gives developers the flexibility to deploy applications in containers, or in language-specific packages such as JAR files.

Cask
What they do: Data application development platform
Why we’re watching: Large companies are becoming large data companies in today’s world, which enables these companies to capture massive amounts of information about their customers, products and partners. Cask views applications as the key use case for Big Data, and its Cask Data Application Framework gives developers the ability to quickly build and deploy data-based applications on Hadoop (and now Cassandra).

IBM Watson
What they do: Cognitive computing, machine learning
Why we’re watching: IBM seems an odd choice for “up-and-coming” company, but IBM Watson, being operated as an independent business unit, can be seen as an incredibly well-funded startup. With piles of money to throw at entrepreneurs creating products and solutions based on computers that can learn from natural language and personality traits, this is one of the most interesting areas of software development out there.

Morphisec
What they do: Cybersecurity
Why we’re watching: This Israel-based startup, which was spawned from that country’s national cybersecurity research center, offers contextualized forensics along with deterministic detection and prevention of zero-day attacks. They say they are creating a super-secure version of Windows “like Microsoft should be doing.” Their goal is to create an operating system for military applications that is 100% unhackable.

Branch
What they do: A deep-linking platform for mobile apps
Why we’re watching: Deep linking is the hidden mechanism that takes mobile device users from app to app without even realizing how he or she got there. Early-stage startup Branch provides a platform for smart redirecting to specific content from most social media platforms and e-mail, and more. The company, which began from the idea of four Stanford engineers to grow their app via contextual deep links, has raised more than $18 million from multiple venture partners.

Object Theory
What they do: Mixed-reality applications for HoloLens
Why we’re watching: This company will go as far as Microsoft does with HoloLens, so it’s a risk/reward type deal for them. If Microsoft’s virtual reality headsets catch on, Object Theory (founded in July of this year) will be in the lead for helping organizations create applications for the platform. If it doesn’t…

Parse
What they do: Cross-platform user experiences
Why we’re watching: Parse has been quickly gaining a following thanks to its ability to help developers build user experiences across a variety of platforms. The company’s early years were rife with harsh lessons at the hands of enterprise users who couldn’t accept the platform’s lack of reliability. Today, however, Parse is a solid place to build incredibly diverse applications for watches, phones and the Web.

Zeplin
What they do: Developer/designer collaboration
Why we’re watching: How many times have you been handed a printout of your Web application with circles and lines all over it? Marketing, business, even customer service agents love to have input into the applications they have to use every day, and Zeplin.io gives them all a way to put their own ideas into the mix without creating a mess of input from various sources. Zeplin gets everyone on the same page, for once.

Livecoding.tv
What they do: Educational live-streaming platform
Why we’re watching: We’ve placed this one on the list simply because we’re completely confused and intrigued by the idea of watching people code on a live video feed. It’s Twitch for programmers. Of course, Twitch’s big draw is connecting gamers to famous streamers via chat, but we can’t imagine too many programmers wanting to interrupt their flow to answer chat questions. Honestly, though, who ever would have believed that Twitch would become so popular at all? Definitely a company to keep an eye on.

Kimono Labs
What they do: API creation and execution
Why we’re watching: Let’s face it, your company needs an API. Your site has a search function, a number of ways to order product, a customer support form, and a dozen directories. Kimono Labs can turn all of these functions into API calls with the click of a mouse. It’s a fabulous way to just toss your API strategy overboard and simply give people easier REST access to stuff that’s already on your site.

Illumio
What they do: Application security
Why we’re watching: Security should be as easy to bake into your product as New Relic is to add to your code: One include, and you’ve got security. While Illumio promises a lot already, it’s definitely time to sit back and watch how the market reacts to its wildly new take on security applications and infrastructure. If Illumio can make this idea work, application security will be forever changed.

Leada
What they do: Data analysis language tutorials
Why we’re watching: R and Python are the lifeblood of data analysis. But there’s just one problem: Most software developers didn’t take classes in hardcore data analysis. If they learned Python, it was likely as a first language, not as a scientific language. Thus, Leada is offering tutorials on both R and Python, aimed at bringing programmers up to speed with modern data analysis techniques.

Rancher Labs
What they do: Container infrastructure platform
Why we’re watching: Networking, service discovery, scheduling and storage management are among the challenges organizations face when trying to work with containers. Rancher Labs offers an infrastructure platform that handles these issues and more so organizations can more easily run Docker in production.

3D Robotics
What they do: Drones
Why we’re watching: Any company whose catchphrase is “Life After Gravity” is worth watching just for that alone. But this drone company is leading the way with its open development platform and guides for creating applications that bring new capabilities to their drones. And besides… drones!

The post Companies to Watch in 2016 appeared first on SD Times.

Features include cross-host networking, container load balancing, storage management, service discovery, service upgrades, resource management, native Docker support, and multi-tenancy and user management.

“Much of the excitement around Docker is its use as a universal packaging and distribution format,” said Sheng Liang, cofounder and CEO of Rancher Labs. “However, as users deploy containers across different infrastructures, they quickly realize that different clouds, virtualization platforms and bare metal servers have dramatically different infrastructure capabilities. By building a common infrastructure backplane across any resource, Rancher implements an entirely new approach to hybrid cloud computing.”

More information is available here.

Google updates Google Play game services
Google is updating its developer tools to give game developers a more stable platform experience, according to the company. Unity has been updated to provide support for Events and Quests, and to enhance multiplayer, save games and sign-in options.

The C++ SDK has been updated to add support for the Nearby Connections API in order for developers to create multiplayer and multi-device games.

Additionally, improvements to the iOS tools have been made for building iOS games, fix UI compatibility issues, and eliminate any gameplay issues such as accepting match invitations and multiplayer.

The post Rancher Labs releases beta version of Rancher, and Google updates Play services—SD Times news digest: June 15, 2015 appeared first on SD Times.

While Docker is able run on almost any Linux distribution, RancherOS was conceptualized out of the company’s own needs, according to Sheng Liang, founder and CEO of Rancher Labs.

“When we started Rancher as a company, we were developing the kind of tools and frameworks that are required to put Docker in production,” he said. “We were running Docker on these other distributions, but ran into things that weren’t satisfactory. We felt with Docker becoming so popular and so useful, it would make sense to build a Linux system specifically to run Docker.”

One of the problems Rancher Labs saw with other Linux distributions was that they weren’t able to keep up with Docker’s rapid release cycle. According to Liang, the Linux distributions were always behind in delivering the latest Docker update, forcing the company to manually install the latest release of the platform itself.

“I can’t even imagine how many times I ended up getting the latest update and then having to immediately go grab Docker myself from its website and override the operating system because its latest version of Docker wasn’t late enough for us,” Liang said. “We are on the cutting edge, and our customers are on the cutting edge, so we always want the latest stuff.”

Liang added that RancherOS solves this problem by limiting itself only to the Docker essentials: the Linux kernel, Docker and the smallest amount of code necessary to bring the two together. In addition, the RancherOS release schedule was designed to align with Docker’s release cycle.

Another problem RancherOS was designed to solve came from other Linux distributions was running systemd and Docker together. Systemd is a Linux system designed to manage system services. According to Liang, systemd and Docker possess an incompatibility issue, making it difficult for systemd to effectively monitor Docker containers. At first, the company created an open-source project called systemd-docker to try to solve the problem, but it couldn’t address all issues. With RancherOS, the company runs what it calls System Docker as the first process the kernel starts. System Docker replaces systemd and allows RancherOS to manage all system services as Docker containers.

“As a side benefit of that, we got rid of a lot of overlapping functionality and got rid of a lot of complexity,” said Liang.

CoreOS, another minimalist operating system with the ability to run Docker as containers, recently released Rocket in order to make systemd a more effect container runtime. But according to Rancher Labs, Rocket doesn’t solve or improve interoperability between systemd and Docker.

“CoreOS is a big inspiration for us to create a minimalist Linux distribution,” Liang said. “They were really the first guys to start doing it in recent times, and we had a lot of experience using CoreOS as well, but it doesn’t solve the issue we needed to solve. We created RancherOS to specifically solve systemd and Docker, and CoreOS is really just built around systemd.”

In addition to CoreOS and RancherOS, other operating systems have been designed to host Docker applications and simplify infrastructure, such as Project Atomic and Snappy Ubuntu Core. Docker welcomed these technologies as they on increased stability and security, according to Peter Salvatore, a member of the technical alliances team at Docker.

“If you are looking for the right foundation for your Docker-based infrastructure, there are a lot of great choices,” he wrote on the company’s blog. “The new minimalist operating systems discussed above represent a major departure from the past and are also worth further investigation.”

RancherOS is still in early development, and the company is already working on incorporating new features based on recent feedback from developers.

“When we initially designed it, we thought maybe most people would run it in a cloud or run it on a hypervisor,” said Liang. “But there has actually been a lot of interest from people who really want to run it on bare metal machines. That is actually one feature we didn’t initially prioritize very much, but it looks now that it should be in the initial production release.”

The company is also working on adding better integration with security features in Linux, as well as richer ways to configure networking.

“We welcome RancherOS as a new addition to the minimalist OS ecosystem that is sprouting up around Docker,” said David Messina, vice president of enterprise marketing at Docker. “The idea of the Docker open platform for distributed applications is to make sure there is great choice for devs and sys admins, and what RancherOS is doing is furthering choice of OS offerings.”

More information about RancherOS is available here.

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