Streamlining Cloud Tools, Platforms Management

DevOps and microservices have transformed the way organizations develop, deploy and manage applications—as well as the underlying infrastructure required to support it, be it cloud on on-premise. On the one hand, DevOps and microservices enable much greater speed and agility. On the other hand, that speed and agility come with a heaping side of complexity.

It’s a beautiful thing when all of the elements of DevOps development are working in harmony. The diverse array of tools and platforms utilized, though, often are missing key security features and capabilities IT teams need.

Apcera has a comprehensive portfolio of open source projects that provides customers with the ability to effectively manage and secure applications across various platforms and cloud infrastructures. The Apcera portfolio includes, among other things, NATS, a cloud-native messaging system; Kurma, a flexible container runtime; and Libretto, a virtual machine provisioning library. The company recently announced that it is extending its platform to also support Kubernetes.

“Apcera … allows customers to securely move to any cloud, and deploy, orchestrate and govern the widest range of workloads on any infrastructure—including on-premises,” said Derek Collison, Apcera founder and CEO, in a press release statement. “Customers and developers are rapidly aligning behind Kubernetes as their API of choice when deploying container-based workloads. With its fast-growing ecosystem and strong market momentum, this was the obvious direction for us to take.”

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration platform, originally created by Google and now managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kubernetes enables organizations to manage large collections of containers as a single system. Embracing Kubernetes expands Apcera’s sphere of influence to include hybrid cloud management. Apcera also will actively contribute to the Kubernetes open source project.

“We believe delivering trust to the cloud is critical, and Apcera has deep and proven expertise in this area,” said Kelsey Hightower, developer advocate, Google Cloud Platform. “We welcome their support of Kubernetes and future participation in the project.”

Containers in particular have been a major security concern. A blog post from Gartner noted, “Security properties of containers are a largely unexplored field and there is a lot of controversial discussion about whether containers do contain or not. At times it seems that the discussion is driven by (hidden) business agendas, partnerships and financial dependencies rather than by plain technology. So, leaving all of this aside, can you make your containers contain or not?”

A lot of progress has been made in the past year toward more secure container technologies. Hyper-V Containers from Microsoft, Clear Containers from Intel, and recent improvements from CoreOS are all examples of the fact that the container world is aware of—and vigilantly working on addressing—the security problem.

Organizations need to understand how secure their infrastructure is, and be able to answer questions such as, “How can I effectively move into production quickly and with scalability?” Streamlining management of diverse cloud tools and platforms enables IT organizations to balance innovation and speed with safety and stability. Rolling Kubernetes support into the Apcera portfolio may be the key to effectively managing and protecting applications and infrastructure in a hybrid cloud environment.