As many deployments of open cloud computing platforms are maturing, integrating and managing container technologies and platforms is a very high priority. Container management and automation tools represent a hot area for development as companies race to fill the growing need to manage highly distributed, cloud-native applications.
Analysts at 451 Research have called containers the “future of virtualization,” predicting strong container growth across on-premises, hosted, and public clouds. Meanwhile, the OpenStack User Survey shows Kubernetes, an open source container cluster manager, taking the lead as the top Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) tool of all.
According to Cloud Foundry’s report ” Hope Vs. Reality: Containers in 2016,” adoption of container technologies, such as Docker, is on fire, with 53 percent of organizations either investigating or using containers in development or in production. The Cloud Foundry report found that containers are a key enabler as companies adopt continuous delivery as part of their digital transformation. It also established that users prefer platforms over orchestration tools for container management.
Meanwhile, companies such as Mirantis are rapidly ramping up container training and certification programs. Mirantis recently announced a container certification program featuring a Kubernetes and Docker bootcamp available in self-paced format. It is squarely focused on container management for cloud deployments.
The Linux Foundation recently announced the release of its 2016 report “Guide to the Open Cloud: Current Trends and Open Source Projects.” This third annual report provides a comprehensive look at the state of open cloud computing. You can download the report now, and one of the first things to notice is that it aggregates and analyzes research, illustrating how trends in containers, microservices, and more shape cloud computing. In fact, from IaaS to virtualization to DevOps configuration management, it provides descriptions and links to categorized projects central to today’s open cloud environment.
In this series of articles, we provide extra insights on how the overall category is evolving. This time, the Guide to the Open Cloud includes a section on container management and automation tools. Below, you’ll find a collection of several of these tools and the impact that they are having, along with links to their repositories, all gathered from the Guide to the Open Cloud:
Apache Aurora is a Mesos framework that runs applications and services across a shared pool of machines and is responsible for keeping them running, forever. When machines experience failure, Aurora intelligently reschedules those jobs onto healthy machines. Aurora Git repository
Apache Mesos, an Apache Software Foundation project, abstracts CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual), to build and run fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems. Mesos Git repository
Diego is Cloud Foundry’s next-generation container management runtime system. Within CF, the Diego system distributes the hosted app load over all of the host VMs and keeps it running and balanced through demand surges, outages, or other changes. Diego on GitHub
Docker Engine is Docker’s open source containerization technology combined with a workflow for building and containerizing applications. Docker containers run on desktops, physical servers, virtual machines, data centers, and public and private clouds. Docker on GitHub
Docker Swarm (Machine and Compose)
Docker Swarm is native clustering for Docker. It turns a pool of Docker hosts into a single, virtual Docker host. Because Docker Swarm serves the standard Docker API, any tool that already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to scale to multiple hosts. It supports multiple tools including Dokku, Docker Compose, Docker Machine, and Jenkins. Docker Swarm on GitHub