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docker

Taking Stock of Cloud Application Platforms

Krishnan Subramanian · January 4, 2018 · Leave a Comment

Based on our agenda to focus on Cloud Native Landscape in the first half of 2018, this post will take stock of the major application platforms to set the context for further discussions in the coming weeks and months (see our post on public cloud for the same reason). In this post, we are discussing the major platforms based on the signals we get from the data we collect from enterprise users. We are also following other platforms closely and our future research will include them.

Red Hat OpenShift

Strengths

  • One of the early adopters of both Docker containers and Kubernetes, OpenShift is built entirely on industry standard components for any container platform
  • With the focus on Developers and DevOps workflow, OpenShift abstracts away some of the complexities associated with Kubernetes deployment
  • With Red Hat’s other products in their portfolio, OpenShift can emerge as the RHEL equivalent for Application Infrastructure

Expectations

In 2018, we expect to hear from Red Hat on their “serverless” strategy. With the success of AWS Lambda and other serverless offerings in the market, the enterprises want to have clarity on Red Hat’s strategy on this. With their JBoss portfolio and their investments in Apache OpenWhisk, we expect to see some announcement to fill this gap.

Pivotal CloudFoundry

Strengths

  • Pivotal’s move up the stack with SpringOne platform and announcements about future “serverless” offerings is a smart move and is in tune with their developer focus. The developers are kingmakers and Pivotal is well positioned to empower them with their focus on Spring and “serverless”
  • With their data assets and a strong consulting business, they are well positioned to help enterprises in their modernization journey

Expectations

We expect Pivotal to move out of CloudFoundry underneath their platform and re-platform completely on Kubernetes and Docker based containers (currently Moby Project). If their core focus is on developers, they should use industry standard commoditized components underneath and focus only on developer experience. We are Day 1 advocate of the CloudFoundry project and we had invited CloudFoundry customers to keynote in our Deploycon conferences but the success of Kubernetes since 2014 makes it critical for Pivotal to focus on building the best developer experience entirely on top of Kubernetes and eliminate any technical debt underneath. With their strength on Spring platform, they can emerge as a strong Kubernetes vendor helping enterprise modernization

Mesosphere DC/OS

Strengths

  • Mesosphere has integrated well with Kubernetes and they are well positioned to support both traditional web apps and data intensive workloads. Their strength in supporting big data frameworks makes them a strong player in the application development platform space
  • Apache Mesos is proven to be a mature enterprise platform and DC/OS on top of Mesos for cluster management makes them a credible enterprise platform

Expectations

Even though they have integrations with many modern developer and DevOps tools, we expect Mesosphere to focus on building a seamless developer experience this year. With the operational maturity underneath (Apache Mesos) and Kubernetes for container orchestration, having a solid developer experience will help Mesosphere DC/OS

There are many Kubernetes based container platforms we didn’t consider for this post as they don’t fit into the App Dev Platform definition. We are closely watching Docker Enterprise, Apprenda, SAP Cloud Platform and it will be part of our analysis in the future.

Docker Announces Support For Kubernetes – An Analysis

Krishnan Subramanian · October 18, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Yesterday at Dockercon EU, Docker announced its support for Kubernetes on the Docker Enterprise Edition, Docker Community Edition as well as its desktop apps as well as the Moby project. This is a significant shift for a company that almost broke the open source community around the then Docker project. They wanted to push the hooks for their orchestration and management plane into the containers under the “batteries included but swappable” marketing campaign. Since then, the wind has blown in the direction of Kubernetes at the orchestration level and the conversation has effectively moved from the standardization around containers to standardization on orchestration plane. In this post, we will discuss the implication of this announcement in the market and how it impacts IT decision makers.

Docker’s foray into Kubernetes World

Yesterday Docker pre-announced the availability of Kubernetes on Docker platforms and the Moby project citing the shared roots between Docker community and Kubernetes community. They also announced that they would make vanilla Kubernetes available and stay close to the recent version instead of the Red Hat model of releasing stable releases for OpenShift Container Platform. According to Docker, there will be better collaboration between the Moby project and Kubernetes project. The end users get the option of selecting Kubernetes or Swarm for orchestration.

The State Of Developer Platforms

It is all about application platforms. How do you empower developers in your organization to seamlessly deploy apps ensuring faster time to market? How organizations enable them depends on the abstraction which, in turn, depends on the nature and requirements of the application being deployed. The early days of cloud saw the debates of IaaS+ vs PaaS and we see similar trends in the era of container native workloads. Kubernetes is fast gaining mindshare, driven by the declarative approach it offers in the automation of container native infrastructure. The quest to pick the right abstraction needed for various applications still see the same kind of demarcation we saw in the early days of cloud computing. It is IaaS+ (driven mainly by Kubernetes even though Mesosphere DCOS and Docker Swarm are other competing platforms) vs the platform abstraction at the developer layer enabled by platforms like OpenShift and Pivotal CloudFoundry (picking Pivotal CloudFoundry specifically because I don’t see any other credible vendor in that ecosystem) vs the serverless or Functions as a Service offerings. The usage patterns range from monolithic and web apps in IaaS+ to Modern apps including Microservices on developers focussed platforms like OpenShift and CloudFoundry to event-driven Microservices in the Serverless/FaaS platforms.

The announcement by CloudFoundry that Kubernetes will become the Container Runtime for CloudFoundry platform combined with Docker’s announcement that Kubernetes will be one of the choices in orchestration plane puts Kubernetes as the core component in the container native application platforms. Kubernetes, by itself, has limited impact but it is emerging as the core component of modern day platforms whether it is IaaS+ or modern PaaS or FaaS. Both Pivotal CloudFoundry and Docker are positioning their support for Kubernetes as giving a choice to their customers. While this may be true in the short term, there is a high chance that Kubernetes will emerge as a standard in the container orchestration and be a standard component of any developer-centric platform.

In that sense, Kubernetes is fast emerging as a standard for container orchestration. But, we want to discount any notion that Kubernetes has won the platform wars. The platform market is wide open with many of the workloads still in VM machines and Kubernetes adoption in production is still in early stages. Functions as a Service (as a public cloud service) or a FaaS Platform that is multi-cloud and agnostic of orchestration layer may take the steam out of Kubernetes just like how Kubernetes took the winds off Docker momentum.

Considerations for IT Decision Makers

This makes the decision much easier for IT decision makers and it helps them consolidate their platform choices without worrying about whether the platform supports Kubernetes or not. If your organization has already invested in Docker Platform, this makes it easy to have a mixed environment where Kubernetes can be used for managing dev and test clusters and Docker Swarm for production. The next version of Docker Enterprise Edition and Docker Community Edition will make this easier for your organization. If you are not a Docker shop and want to have a choice in the container orchestration, it makes sense to go with Docker Platform. Otherwise, there are other choices from established vendors like Red Hat OpenShift or Pivotal’s CloudFoundry Platform. Between Red Hat OpenShift and Pivotal CloudFoundry, the decision is mostly cultural. If you are an IT-centric organization, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is well suited for your needs. If you are a developer focussed organization, Red Hat’s OpenShift Online or OpenShift Dedicated or Pivotal’s CloudFoundry are better options. Depending on the tolerance level of the organization for betting on startups, there are other options like Mesosphere DCOS, Rancher Labs, Heptio and many others. But if your end goal is to embrace Functions as a Service, you could still use containers to encapsulate the backend services but we would strongly recommend that you bet on multi-cloud, container orchestration agnostic platforms. It doesn’t make sense to embrace Kubernetes just for using FaaS.

Conclusion

Docker’s move into Kubernetes is the next logical step for them after they failed to capitalize on the momentum behind their container mindshare. This also makes them a much easier acquisition target as every big company has bet their modern stack strategy on Kubernetes. It will be interesting to see where Docker goes from here as Steve Singh takes full control with the newer round of funding expected to happen soon.

Virtual Panel: VMworld 2017 Recap

Krishnan Subramanian · September 6, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Yesterday, we hosted a Virtual Panel on VMworld 2017 talking about the news that came out of VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas last week. The panelists are:

  • John Allwright, Pivotal Inc
  • Rob Bissett, Virtustream
  • Scott Fulton, The New Stack
  • Bryan Friedman, Pivotal Inc
  • Krishnan Subramanian, Rishidot Research (Moderator)

We discussed many topics ranging from the recent cloud announcements by VMware, Multi Cloud Strategy, Pivotal Container Service, Enterprise use of Kubernetes and whether BOSH can emerge as a standard for infrastructure services orchestration. Watch the video below.

 

 

Virtual Panel: Dockercon 2017 Debriefing

Krishnan Subramanian · April 26, 2017 · Leave a Comment

We had a great panel talking about what happened in Dockercon 2017 held last week in Austin. We had a great group of panelists and had wide-ranging discussions from Dockercon 2017 event to future of Docker.

Quick Analysis: Docker Secrets Management Announcement

Krishnan Subramanian · February 13, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Recently Docker Inc. announced Docker Secrets Management, a secure way to store confidential announcements like credentials, tokens, passwords, certificates, etc. so that containerized applications can securely communicate with other services. This is released for Docker Swarm right now and it will be released for Docker Compose in the near future. The basic secrets management feature is available for all users of Docker platform right now but if you want role based access control, it is a paid feature. Clearly, Docker is making their platforms more palatable to enterprise customers, one of the weakness they had to fend off as the compete with other platform vendors like Red Hat and Pivotal who tout container security as one of their strong points.

Even though Kubernetes has a similar feature and one can manually enable TLS with Kubernetes Secrets, Docker makes TLS a default for access. Docker secrets uses In-Memory for keeping the decrypted password and doesn’t store the file in a disk storage while an application is using it. However, if the service running in the container is compromised, the Docker Secrets kept unencrypted in-memory will also be compromised. The secrets management system will also notify all nodes to delete the secrets if the service is deleted or rescheduled.

In short, this is a required enterprise feature added by Docker for their platform and making role based access control to secrets a premium feature is a smart move which indicates that Docker, as a company, has realized that they need to go beyond the spirits of end to end OSS model to justify their valuation. There is nothing wrong with it as it is the reality in the industry.

Document Source

Quick Analysis: ]([]https://github.com/rishidot/Quick-Analysis/blob/master/2017/Docker-Secrets-Feb.md)

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