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.