Search Results for: container

Kubernetes has, in the span of a few short years, become the de facto orchestration software for containers. As few as two years ago there were more than a half-dozen orchestration tools vying for the top spot and now there is only Kubernetes. Even the Linux Foundation’s other orchestrator project, CloudFoundry Diego, is starting to give way to Kubernetes. Part of the success of Kubernetes can be attributed to the support of Google. Kubernetes emerged out of Google and they have continued to bolster the project even as it fell under the auspices of the Linux Foundation’s CNCF.

On August 29, 2018, Google announced that it is giving $9M in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) credit to the CNCF Kubernetes project. This is being hailed by both Google and the CNCF as an announcement of major support. $9M is a lot of money, even if it is credits. However, let’s unpack this announcement a bit more and see what it really means.
Continue reading Google Grants $9 Million in Google Cloud Platform Credits to Kubernetes Project

Vendors and Solutions Mentioned: VMware, CloudHealth Technologies, Cloudyn, Microsoft Azure Cloud Cost Management, Cloud Cruiser, HPE OneSphere. Nutanix Beam, Minjar, Botmetric

Key Stakeholders: Chief Financial Officers, Chief Information Officers, Chief Accounting Officers, Chief Procurement Officers, Cloud Computing Directors and Managers, IT Procurement Directors and Managers, IT Expense Directors and Managers

Key Takeaway: As Best-of-Breed vendors continue to emerge, new technologies are invented, existing services continue to evolve, vendors pursue new and innovative pricing and delivery models, cloud computing remains easy to procure, and IaaS doubles every three years as a spend category, cloud computing management will only increase in complexity and the need for Cloud Service Management will only increase. VMware has made a wise choice in buying into a rapidly growing market and now has greater opportunity to support and augment complex peak, decentralized, and hybrid IT environments.

About the Announcement

On August 27, 2018, VMware announced a definitive agreement to acquire CloudHealth Technologies, a Boston-based startup company focused on providing a cloud operations and expense management platform that supports enterprise accounts across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Continue reading VMware Purchases CloudHealth Technologies to support Multicloud Enterprises and Continue Investing in Boston

For much of the past 30 years, Microsoft was famous for its hostility toward Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). They reserved special disdain for Linux, the Unix-like operating system that first emerged in the 1990s. Linux arrived on the scene just as Microsoft was beginning to batter Unix with Windows NT. The Microsoft leadership at the time, especially Steve Ballmer, viewed Linux as an existential threat. They approached Linux with an “us versus them” mentality that was, at times, rabid.

It’s not news that times have changed and Microsoft with it. Instead of looking to destroy Linux and FOSS, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has embraced it.

Microsoft has begun to meld with the FOSS community, creating Linux-Windows combinations that were unthinkable in the Ballmer era.

In just the past few years Microsoft has:
Continue reading Microsoft Loves Linux and FOSS Because of Developers

On a monthly basis, I will be rounding up key news associated with the Data Science Platforms space for Amalgam Insights. Companies covered will include: Alteryx, Anaconda, Cloudera, Databricks, Dataiku, DataRobot,  Datawatch, Domino, H2O.ai, IBM, Immuta, Informatica, KNIME, MathWorks, Microsoft, Oracle, Paxata, RapidMiner, SAP, SAS, Tableau, Talend, Teradata, TIBCO, Trifacta.

Continue reading Data Science Platforms News Roundup, July 2018

The announcement: On July 10, Domino Data Lab announced a partnership with SAS Analytics that will let Domino users run SAS Analytics for Containers in the public cloud on AWS while using Domino’s data science platform as the orchestration layer for the infrastructure provisioning and management. This partnership will allow SAS customers to use Domino as an orchestration layer to access multiple SAS environments for model building, deploy multiple SAS applications on AWS, track each SAS experiment in detail, while having reproducibility of prior work.

What does this mean?

Domino customers with SAS Analytics workloads currently running on-prem will now be able to deploy those workloads to the public cloud on AWS by using SAS Analytics for Containers via the Domino platform. Domino plans to follow up with support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform to further enable enterprises to offload containerized SAS workloads in the cloud. By running SAS Analytics for Containers via Domino, Domino users will be able to track, provide feedback on, and reproduce their containerized SAS experiments the same way they do so with other experiments they’ve constructed using Python, R, or other tools within Domino.

Continue reading Domino Deploys SAS Analytics Into a Model-Driven Cloud

Last week, Microsoft Inspire took place, which meant that Microsoft made a lot of new product announcements regarding the Azure cloud. In general, Microsoft is both looking up and trying to catch up to Amazon from a market share perspective while trying to keep its current #2 place in the Infrastructure as a Service world ahead of rapidly growing Google Cloud Platform as well as IBM and Oracle.  Microsoft Azure is generally regarded as a market-leading cloud platform, along with Amazon, that provides storage, computing, and security and is moving towards analytics, networking, replication, hybrid synchronization, and blockchain support.

Key functionalities that Microsoft has announced include:
Continue reading Azure Advancements Announced at Microsoft Inspire 2018

Industry: Data Science Platforms

Key Stakeholders: IT managers, data scientists, data analysts, database administrators, application developers, enterprise statisticians, machine learning directors and managers, current DataScience.com customers, current Oracle customers

Why It Matters: Oracle released a number of AI tools in Q4 2017, but until now, it lacked a data science platform to support complete data science workflows. With this acquisition, Oracle now has an end-to-end platform to manage these workflows and support collaboration among teams of data scientists and business users, and it joins other major enterprise software companies in being able to operationalize data science.

Top Takeaways: Oracle acquired DataScience.com to retain customers with data science needs in-house rather than risk losing their data science-based business to competitors. However, Oracle has not yet not defined a timeline for rolling out the unified data science platform, or its future availability on the Oracle Cloud.

Oracle Acquires DataScience.com

On May 16, 2018, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire DataScience.com, an enterprise data science platform that Oracle expects to add to the Oracle Cloud environment. With Oracle’s debut of a number of AI tools last fall, this latest acquisition telegraphs Oracle’s intent to expedite its entrance into the data science platform market by buying its way in.

Oracle is reviewing DataScience.com’s existing product roadmap and will supply guidance in the future, but they mean to provide a single unified data science platform in concert with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and its existing SaaS and PaaS offerings, empowering customers with a broader suite of machine learning tools and a complete workflow. Continue reading Market Milestone: Oracle Builds Data Science Gravity By Purchasing DataScience.com

From April 18-20, Amalgam Insights attended Cloud Foundry Summit 2018 in our hometown of Boston, MA. Both Research Fellow Tom Petrocelli and Founder Hyoun Park attended as we explored the current positioning of Cloud Foundry as an application development platform in light of the ever-changing world of technology. The timing of Cloud Foundry Summit this year coincided with Pivotal’s IPO, which made this Summit especially interesting. Through our attendance of keynote sessions, panels, and the analyst program, we took away several key lessons.

First, the conflict between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes is disappearing as each solution has found its rightful place in the DevOps world. My colleague Tom Petrocelli goes into more detail in explaining how the perceived conflict between Cloud Foundry’s initial containerization efforts and Kubernetes is not justified. This summit made very clear that Cloud Foundry is a very practical solution focused on supporting enterprise-grade applications that abstracts both infrastructure and scale. Amalgam takes the stance that this conflict in software abstraction should never have been there in the first place. Practitioners have been creating an artificial conflict that the technology solutions are seeking to clarify and ameliorate.

At the event, Cloud Foundry also announced heavy-hitting partners. Alibaba Cloud is now a Gold member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. With this announcement, Cloud Foundry goes to China and joins the fastest growing cloud in the world. This announcement mirrors Red Hat’s announcement of Alibaba becoming an Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider last October and leads to an interesting showdown in China as developers choose between Cloud Foundry and OpenStack to build China’s future of software.

In addition, Cloud Foundry Foundation announced Cloud.gov as the 8th certified provider of Cloud Foundry. This step forward will allow federal agencies to use a certified and FedRAMP Authorized Cloud Foundry platform. The importance of this announcement was emphasized in an Air Force-led session on Project Kessel Run, which is focused on agile software for the Air Force. This session showed how how Cloud Foundry accelerated the ability to execute in an environment where the average project took over 8 years to complete due to challenges such as the need to ask for Congressional approval on a yearly basis. By using Cloud Foundry, the Air Force has identified opportunities to build applications in a couple of months and get these tools directly to soldiers to create culture that is #AgileAF (which obviously stands for “Agile Air Force”). The role of Cloud Foundry is accelerating one of the most challenging and governed application development environments in the world accentuated the value of Cloud Foundry in effectively enabling the vaunted goal of digital transformation.

From a technical perspective, the announcement that really grabbed our attention was the demonstration of cfdev in providing a full Cloud Foundry development experience on a local laptop or workstation on native hypervisors. This will make adoption far easier for developers seeking to quickly develop and debut applications as well as to help developers build test and sandbox environments for Cloud Foundry.

Overall, this event demonstrated the evolution of Cloud Foundry. The themes of Cloud Foundry as both a government enabler and the move to China were front and center throughout this event. Combined with the Pivotal IPO and Cloud Foundry’s ability to work with Kubernetes, it is hard to deny Cloud Foundry’s progress as an enterprise and global solution for application development acceleration and in working as a partner with other appropriate technologies.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been to two conferences that are run by an open source community. The first was the CloudFoundry Summit in Boston followed by KubeCon+CloudNativeCon Europe 2018 in Copenhagen. At both, I found passionate and vibrant communities of sysops, developers, and companies. For those unfamiliar with CloudFoundry and Kubernetes, they are open source technologies that abstract software infrastructure to make it easier for developers and sysops to deliver applications more quickly.

Both serve similar communities and have a generally similar goal. There is some overlap – CloudFoundry has its own container and container orchestration capability – but the two technologies are mostly complementary. It is possible, for example, to deploy CloudFoundry as a Kubernetes cluster and use CloudFoundry to deploy Kubernetes. I met with IT professionals that are doing one or both of these. The same is true for OpenStack and CloudFoundry (and Kubernetes for that matter). OpenStack is used to abstract the hardware infrastructure, in effect creating a cloud within a data center. It is a tool used by sysops to provision hardware as easily scalable resources, creating a private cloud. So, like CloudFoundry does for software, OpenStack helps to manage resources more easily so that a sysop doesn’t have to do everything by hand. CloudFoundry and OpenStack are clearly complementary. Sysops use OpenStack to create resources in the form of a private cloud; developers then use CloudFoundry to pull together private and public cloud resources into a platform they deploy applications to. Kubernetes can be found in any of those places.

Fake News, Fake Controversies

Why then, is there this constant tension between the communities and adopters of these technologies? It’s as if carpenters had hammer people and saw people who argued over which was better. According to my carpenter friends, they don’t. The foundations and vendors avoid this type of talk, but these kinds of discussions are happening at the practitioner and contributor level all the time. During KubeCon+CloudnativeCon Europe 2018, I saw a number of tweets that, in essence, said: “Why is Cloud Foundry Executive Director Abby Kearns speaking at KubeCon?” They questioned what one had to do with the other. Why not question what peanut butter and jelly have to do with each other?

Since each of these open source projects (and the products based on them) have a different place in a modern hybrid cloud infrastructure, how is it that very smart people are being so short-sighted? Clearly, there is a problem in these communities that limit their point of view. One theory lies in what it takes to proselytize these projects within an organization and wider community. To put it succinctly, to get corporate buy-in and widespread adoption, community members have to become strongly focused on their specific project. So focused, that some put on blinders and can no longer see the big picture. In fact, in order to sell the world on something that seems radical at first, you trade real vision for tunnel vision.

People become invested in what they do and that’s good for these type of community developed technologies. They require a commitment to a project that can’t be driven by any one company and may not pan out. It turns toxic when the separate communities become so ensconced in their own little corner of the tech world that they can’t see the big picture. The very nature of these projects defies an overriding authority that demands the everyone get along, so they don’t always.

It’s time to get some perspective, to see the big picture. We have an embarrassment of technology abstraction riches. It’s time to look up from individual projects and see the wider world. Your organizations will love you for it.

Standing in the main expo hall of KubeCon+CloudNativeCon Europe 2018 in Copenhagen, the richness of the Kubernetes ecosystem is readily apparent. There are booths everywhere, addressing all the infrastructure needs for an enterprise cluster. There are meetings everywhere for the open source projects that make up the Kubernetes and Cloud Native base of technology. The keynotes are full. What was a 500-person conference in 2012 is now, 6 years later, a 4300-person conference even though it’s not in one of the hotbeds of American technology such as San Francisco or New York City.

What is amazing is how much Kubernetes has grown in such a short amount of time. It was only a little more than a year ago that Docker released its Kubernetes competitor called Swarm. While Swarm still exists, Docker also supports, and arguably is betting the future, on Kubernetes.
Kubernetes came out of Google, but that doesn’t really explain why it expanded like the early universe after the Big Bang. Google is not the market leader in the cloud space – it’s one of the top vendors but not the top vendor – and wouldn’t have provided enough market pull to drive the Kubernetes engine this hot. Google is also not a major enterprise infrastructure software vendor the way IBM, Microsoft, or even Red Hat and Canonical are.

Kubernetes benefited from the first mover effect. They were early into the market with container orchestration, were fully open source, and had a large amount of testing in Google’s own environment. Docker Swarm, on the other hand, was too closely tied to Docker, the company, to appease the open source gods.

Now, Kubernetes finds itself like a new college graduate. It’s all grown up but needs to prepare for the real world. The basics are all in place and it’s mature but there is an enormous amount of refinement and holes that need to be filled in for it to be a common part of every enterprise software infrastructure. KubeCon+CloudNativeCon shows that this is well underway. The focus now is on security, monitoring, network improvement, and scalability. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of concern about stability or basic functionality.

Kubernetes has eaten the container world and didn’t get indigestion. That’s rare and wonderful.