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Category: Containers

Sysdig raises $15 million in Series B funding to expand container monitoring for enterprises
The containernative monitoring company surpasses 100 enterprise customers

San Francisco, CA DATE Sysdig, the containernative monitoring company today announced a $15 million Series B funding round by existing investors Accel and Bain Capital Ventures. Sysdig will use the funds to accelerate growth, to continue building out its core technology for container and microservice environments, and to scale its operations and worldclass support infrastructure to meet growing demand.

“Containers are the building block for microservices, and represent the next great platform shift for software developers in enterprises of all sizes,” said Loris Degioanni, CEO and founder of Sysdig. “While containers deliver efficiency and agility for developers, they introduce additional complexity for monitoring, troubleshooting, and operating production environments. Sysdig was born to address these specific needs for containers and the microservices built on top of them.”

According to a recent survey, 81 percent of respondents expect their companies to increase the investment in containerbased technology. Respondents ranged from industry verticals including retail, banking/finance, manufacturing, and Internet infrastructure.

Accel Partners and Bain Capital Ventures coled this round of funding. “Containers will address the majority of use cases that heavier virtual machines do today, plus more that virtual machines cannot,” said Salil Deshpande, Managing Director at Bain Capital Ventures, who joins the board of Sysdig. “What’s needed now is software that natively understands containers, applications running within them, and services built on top of them. Sysdig has all of these capabilities and more.”

Sysdig Cloud is based on sysdig, the open source troubleshooting tool that has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of developers, devops, and sysadmins around the world. Its patent‐pending ContainerVisionTM technology provides deep, request‐level visibility inside containers without invasive instrumentation. This approach succeeds for container monitoring where legacy monitoring fails, and at the same time makes monitoring applications and microservices simpler and more robust.
Company sails past 100 enterprise customers

“The service and support I’ve received from the Sysdig team was really impressive. I encourage anyone looking to run containers in a production environment to talk to them first.”
Branden Makana, Senior Software Engineer, CDK Global

“From exploration down to deep system captures, Sysdig has a complete approach to monitoring containerized environments.”
Zachary Smith, CEO of Packet

In less than 8 months since general availability, Sysdig has passed 100 enterprise customers. More than a third of those have signed up in this year alone. These customers represent a broad range of industries and company sizes. For example:

● Industries such as finance, healthcare, media, telecommunications, technology, and consulting are using Sysdig Cloud

● Multiple Fortune 500 companies

● Companies from North America, Europe, and AsiaPacific are adopting thesolutionCustomers are adopting Sysdig cloud for the ability to monitor production environments that require deep visibility into not only containers but also the microservices built on top of them. Chris Crane, VP of Product at Sysdig noted, “Our strategy combines containernative monitoring with native integration across ecosystem players like Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesosphere, as well as cloud providers like AWS and Google. These native integrations customers serviceoriented visibility, and the flexibility to choose the right mix of tools for their environment.”
About Sysdig

Sysdig (Twitter: @sysdig), the containernative visibility company, is creating a new generation of performance management solutions to deliver monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting in a microservicesfriendly architecture. The company’s open source sysdig technology has attracted a community of hundreds of thousands of developers, administrators and other IT professionals looking for deep visibility into systems and containers. Sysdig Cloud is the first and only comprehensive, containernative monitoring solution for applications and infrastructures.
April 21, 2016
Mesosphere Democratizes the Container-Based Datacenter with DC/OS Open Source Project; Backed by Accenture, Cisco, Equinix, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft and Many Others
More than 60 leading technology companies collaborate to deliver first 100% open source datacenter-scale operating system for running containers and distributed apps in production.

SAN FRANCISCO — (Marketwired, April 19, 2016) — A broad alliance of leading companies today joined forces with Mesosphere to unveil the beta release of DC/OS, the first open and comprehensive platform for building, running and scaling modern enterprise applications. Derived from Mesosphere’s revolutionary Datacenter Operating System, the 100 percent open source DC/OS offers powerful capabilities for container operations at scale and single-click, app-store-like installation of 20+ complex distributed systems (called DC/OS “services”), including HDFS, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra and more. DC/OS lets every company deploy the automated infrastructure powering applications at some of the world’s largest technology companies.

“The world needed a better architecture for all modern apps, not just containers,” said Florian Leibert, CEO & Co-Founder of Mesosphere. “DC/OS represents a major industry transformation, delivering today’s enterprises an open source datacenter-scale operating system that pools compute resources into what looks like one big computer, running containers, microservices, big data systems and other components of modern applications with ease. The open source community has come together around DC/OS to deliver an amazing ecosystem of products and datacenter services.”

More than 60 partners— including Accenture, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Microsoft — have had early access to DC/OS leading up to its launch and have pledged to help grow and shape the project through technology integrations and open source software contributions. DC/OS brings the industry’s most proven approach for container operations, and its Universe “app store” brings single-click deployment and simplified operations for the latest generation of services designed to run in distributed environments.

View a list of supporting quotes from DC/OS launch partners.

“DC/OS is the inevitable next step for Apache Mesos,” said Benjamin Hindman, Co-Creator of Mesos and Mesosphere Chief Architect and Co-Founder. “Organizations that run Mesos quickly discover they need all of the components we’ve built into DC/OS. DC/OS will democratize large-scale distributed systems and the applications they power, building on the work of the Apache Mesos kernel. By open sourcing DC/OS we’re enabling organizations of all sizes to harness the same computing infrastructure as the Twitters and Apples of the world.”

Organizations and individuals are invited to join the DC/OS community at dcos.io. The DC/OS name and trademarks are attached to the open source community, and Mesosphere is committed to working with the community to determine the right long-term home for the project.

Read more about DC/OS on the Mesosphere blog.

Partners Driving Deployments

One of the earliest DC/OS collaborators—Microsoft—announced today the general availability of Azure Container Service, including support for DC/OS. First announced in September, Azure Container Service is a completely open-source-based, production-ready container service. Azure Container Service is the easiest way to get started with DC/OS and is uniquely designed to give customers flexibility and easy deployment while taking advantage of proven technology and vibrant community support. DC/OS is also available for cloud deployment via the Azure Marketplace.

“DC/OS takes an open source approach ideally suited for applications that will define the next decade of business,” said Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure Chief Technology Officer. “Microsoft selected DC/OS for the Azure Container Service so our customers can easily build, deploy and manage modern applications on our enterprise-ready Azure cloud platform, as well as in private and hybrid cloud environments.”

Read Microsoft’s blog post about why it supports DC/OS.

Other DC/OS partners from across the IT spectrum are already delivering strong integrations between DC/OS and their products and services. These include industry leaders such as Accenture, Equinix and HPE, as well as many innovative enterprise IT startups.

“DC/OS is specifically designed for organizations seeking highly scalable, agile application development with continuous improvement and robust, reliable deployment,” said Edy Liongosari, managing director, Accenture Labs. “Accenture is mature in its ability to implement container-based solutions and DC/OS is a powerful underlying technology that will provide us with the implementation agility needed for custom development projects. We look forward to continuing our participation in the DC/OS open source project and supporting the evolution of the ecosystem.”

“Hybrid and multi-cloud deployments are the new reality,” said Ihab Tarazi, CTO of Equinix. “We see DC/OS as a critical part of the true hybrid cloud. Equinix is home to 1,100 network providers across 145 datacenters in 21 countries and we will be using DC/OS to form the foundation for an open source ecosystem that innovates around multi-cloud and IoT. We believe that DC/OS, combined with other initiatives like Open Compute, will drive rapid innovation in the manageability, performance, security, and reliability of modern applications in hybrid environments.”

“Businesses want to accelerate the development and delivery of secure and scalable cloud native services,” said Manoj Nair, Vice President, CDI Converged Product Management, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “HPE is excited to partner with Mesosphere to simplify this process for customers by bringing together container orchestration, big data, and composable technologies for modern data centers.”

Read HPE’s blog post about why it supports DC/OS.

A Universe of Services

DC/OS Universe, an app-store-like experience for exploring and installing services, is a built-in component of DC/OS. The Universe provides an open catalog of services built to run on DC/OS. making it easy for developers and operators to install and run complex distributed systems like Spark, Cassandra, Kafka and NGINX—the building blocks of modern applications—with ease. The DC/OS Universe simplifies packaging and delivery of its services for use in datacenter and cloud environments and provides a low-friction distribution path for ISVs that is analogous to app stores on desktop and mobile devices. With a single command or click within the DC/OS CLI or GUI, users can install services on the DC/OS. Any software developer can build services that run on DC/OS and publish them to Universe—thus inheriting the scalability and high availability of DC/OS.

“We’re excited to join the DC/OS community in this launch, as developers and operators can now easily access and deploy NGINX as part of their DC/OS environment through Universe,” said Gus Robertson, CEO of NGINX, Inc. “NGINX is one of the most widely deployed application tools in containerized environments, enabling organizations to confidently build and deliver their next-generation applications at scale. We see a huge opportunity for the DC/OS Universe to bring plug-and-play services and apps such as NGINX and NGINX Plus to the distributed enterprise.”

The Open Source Community Behind DC/OS

DC/OS is an evolution of the Apache Mesos technology originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009. Mesos was inspired by the types of systems that manage datacenter resources for companies such as Microsoft and Google, and simplifies the work of managing datacenters and the process deploying modern datacenter-scale applications. It works essentially by aggregating datacenter resources—tens of thousands of servers in its largest deployments—into a single logical computer on which many workloads (Docker containers, Hadoop, Spark and Kafka, to name a few) can run simultaneously.

“Using new architectural principles such as containers at carrier-scale, Verizon is taking new applications from idea to production with greater speed than traditional deployments,” said Larry Rau, Director of Architecture & Infrastructure, Verizon Labs. “Combining resources from the greater open source community and DC/OS technology, Verizon will be able to better standardize operations and maximize efficiencies across multiple datacenters. The launch of the DC/OS open source community is another step toward accelerating innovation in the datacenter.”

“At Cisco we are interested in using DC/OS to deliver Mantl (mantl.io), our batteries included end to end solution for your microservices infrastructure,” said Ken Owens, Chief Technical Officer, Cloud Infrastructure Services at Cisco Systems. “The design point for Mantl is to focus a community around an end to end solution, not around an individual component; designed to solve business and team challenges, one glue, improved by the community, tested everywhere. We are very excited to be working with Mesosphere on DC/OS as this project that will greatly improve the stability and reliability of the microservices platform deployment and runtime.”

The DC/OS platform, originally developed by Mesosphere, includes Apache Mesos as core technology (or kernel) but adds significant functionality above and around Mesos. Marathon is the native container-orchestration engine for DC/OS, and already runs large-scale Docker environments and other long-running applications at many large companies. DC/OS packages for Spark, Kafka, Cassandra, HDFS, Jenkins and other distributed systems increase operational simplicity and flexibility beyond what’s possible running them on non-Mesos platforms. Other DC/OS components—there are more than 30 overall, ranging from the build kit to the user interface—make it simpler than ever to install, run and manage modern applications on a wide range of platforms.

“Yelp is a heavy user of DC/OS technologies for managing a large Docker environment that spans our private datacenters and the public cloud,” said Michael Stoppelman, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Yelp. “We even built our in house PaaS—PaaSTA—on top of DC/OS’s Marathon. Adopting these technologies has given Yelp’s developers and operators remarkable agility, and we believe DC/OS can bring the same results to all companies as they embrace technologies such as containers and cloud computing.”

DC/OS is currently v1.7 and in beta. Based on the community’s confidence in the code, Mesosphere expects it to transition to general availability (GA) by Q3 of this year.

DC/OS Founding Partners

10th Magnitude (www.10thmagnitude.com), Accenture (www.accenture.com), Alluxio (www.alluxio.com), ArangoDB (www.arangodb.com), Autodesk (www.autodesk.com), Avi Networks (www.avinetworks.com), Big Industries (www.bigindustries.be), Big Switch (www.bigswitch.com), Buoyant (www.buoyant.io), Cake Solutions (www.cakesolutions.net), Canonical (www.canonical.com), Capgemini (www.capgemini.com), Cervoo (www.cervoo.com), Chef (www.chef.io), Cisco (www.cisco.com), Citrix (www.citrix.com), Cockroach Labs (www.cockroachlabs.com), Confluent (www.confluent.io), Container Solutions (www.container-solutions.com), Data Art (www.dataart.com), Data Dog (www.datadog.com), Data Fellas (www.data-fellas.guru), Datera (www.datera.io), Dynatrace (www.dynatrace.com), Element Analytics (www.elementanalytics.com), Elodina (www.elodina.net), EMC (www.emc.com), Equinix (www.equinix.com), HPE (www.hpe.com), Iguaz.io (www.iguaz.io), InfoSiftr (www.infosiftr.com), Ishi Systems (www.ishisystems.com), Joyent (www.joyent.com), Kovarus (www.kovarus.com), Lightbend (www.lightbend.com), Linker Networks (www.linkernetworks.com), Magnetic.io (www.magnetic.io), MapR (www.mapr.com), MemSQL (www.memsql.com), Mesosphere (www.mesosphere.com), Metaswitch (www.metaswitch.com), Microsoft (www.microsoft.com), Miracl (www.miracl.com), NetApp (www.netapp.com), NGINX (www.nginx.com), Offscale (www.offscale.io), OpenCredo (www.opencredo.com), Packet (www.packet.net), Puppet (www.puppet.com), QCT (www.qct.io), Quobyte (www.quobyte.com), Redapt (www.redapt.com), Samsung SAMIIO (www.samsungsami.io), SolidFire (www.solidfire.com), Sumologic (www.sumologic.com), Sysdig (www.sysdig.com), Vapor.io (www.vapor.io), Verizon (www.verizon.com), Weaveworks (www.weave.works), Xentaurs (www.xentaurs.com), Yelp (www.yelp.com)

Additional Materials
About Mesosphere

Mesosphere (Twitter: @Mesosphere) is leading the enterprise transformation toward distributed computing and modern applications with its Datacenter Operating System, and is the principal founding member of the DC/OS open source project. DC/OS is a production-proven datacenter-scale platform for container operations and simple installation of complex distributed systems—including HDFS, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra and more. Mesosphere was founded in 2013 by the architects of hyperscale infrastructures at Airbnb and Twitter, along with the co-creator of Apache Mesos. Backed by A Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Data Collective, Fuel Capital, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Triangle Peak Partners and Microsoft, Mesosphere is headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in New York and Hamburg, Germany.

In March, Mesosphere announced that it closed $73.5 million in a Series C funding round led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, with Microsoft joining as a new strategic investor. The round brought Mesosphere’s total funding to date to nearly $126 million and supports the company’s accelerating growth as DC/OS becomes the de facto standard for enterprises operating containers and distributed systems in production.
April 19, 2016
State of DevOps Survey – The Ultimate Feedback Loop

If there’s any consistent criticism of the larger DevOps movement, it’s that the talking heads and industry gadflies are driving the conversation, not the people in the trenches.

All the thought leadership panels and “how-to” content (including the written and AV materials on this very site) make for great watercooler discussion, but lack the input of those dev, ops and IT management pros who are actually living the DevOps experience, some critics have said.

Well, fair enough. Talking heads are paid to talk. Thought leaders are chosen to lead the debate at conferences and on webcasts. Bloggers blog. Reporters report. This is simply the way of the world. Certain voices are heard via the channels they frequent. It is, as so many people are fond of saying these days, what it is.

So what about everyone else? What of the people reading this stunning prose and listening to these talks while rolling their eyes based on the connectivity of it all to their real-world experience? How can their voices be heard?

Independent of jumping into the blogsphere or applying to speak at said industry events – which you should, btw – there’s one significant opportunity available to anyone who cares to take the time – participating in industry research.

Over the next few business days, citizens of the DevOps world will have their last chance to contribute to the industry’s most widely read and respected research project, the State of DevOps Report.

If you haven’t done so already, take the time to fill out this year’s survey, and make sure that your voice is heard when the subsequent report is published in June. Sure, it takes a little time, about 15-20 minutes; but that’s because it goes to the trouble of exploring the real-world issues that weigh most heavily on today’s practitioners.

Why is this particular project so important, or even credible? Consider that the minds behind the survey and analysis resulting in the 2016 State of DevOps Report are those authors and talking heads that actually get the most respect.

Backed by DevOps Research and Assessments (DORA), the independent think tank operated by a partnership of Jez Humble, Gene Kim, and Nicole Forsgren – perhaps the most respected voices on the landscape, along with Nigel Kersten, the project is categorically aimed at surfacing the truth about DevOps adoption today – not merely promoting the interests of vendor sponsors.

Like previous iterations of the report, the 2016 edition will focus on topics including IT performance, technical practices, culture, lean management, and organizational performance. This year’s survey also examines several new areas, including the ROI of IT performance, security and compliance, and containers.

To further entice participation, project leaders are also offering free tickets to the DevOps Enterprise Summit, along with forthcoming books from some of the industry’s leading advocates to a lucky few who take the time to get involved.

DevOps success is fundamentally based on the notion of increased collaboration and continuous feedback among the people scattered across the SDLC. Likewise, the legitimacy of this research project is utterly dependent on the input of as many real-world practitioners as possible.

If you’re one of those individuals, and you really care whether or not everyone else involved in the advancement of DevOps understands what this all means to you, do yourself a favor and participate.

Much like an application being built using DevOps practices, this quality of this project will be directly determined by the degree to which anyone with insight is willing to get involved and build toward optimal results.

Take the 2016 State of DevOps Survey… today!

April 15, 2016
Puppet, Like DevOps, Continues to Mature

Over the course of the last several years we have seen the DevOps movement continue to mature and evolve. It has moved beyond the early adopter, visionary stage into the mainstream of the market. Therefore, it should be no surprise that some of the leading solutions in the DevOps space should likewise mature and evolve as well. Yesterday Puppet (formerly Puppet Labs) made several announcements as part of a broader message that they are ready, willing and able to continue to be a leader in this space for years to come.

There are several parts of the Puppet announcement yesterday, lets have a look at each of them:

Growth indicators – Somewhat mandatory, Puppet announced that they continue to enjoy rapid growth.

Not a lot to add here, the numbers speak for themselves.

Puppet Labs is now just Puppet. In my conversation with Nathan Rawlins, SVP of marketing, he said that this was a case of recognizing what the market is already doing. I don’t know how many people you have heard refer to the company as Puppet Labs. Most everyone I know says Puppet. So why push rope up hill? Henceforth the company will be known simply as Puppet.

But there is more than just the name here. Rawlins told me that along with the new name, they have also gone through a complete rebranding. New logo, new website look, new collateral look. The new brand seeks to give the impression of simplicity, stability and maturity.

New leadership – The company has hired a software/tech industry veteran leader, Sanjay Mirchandani as President, COO. Mirchandani has held senior leadership roles at VMware, EMC and Microsoft. His responsibilities will include go-to-market operations, including sales, marketing, customer success, and global expansion. From what Rawlins told me, Sanjay will be leading much of the day to day operations of the company.

This is not a case though of a professional leader coming in to replace the founder/CEO. Puppet’s Luke Kanies remains in the CEO role. Mirchandani will free up Kanies to do what he is best at. Be a visionary and chart the course for Puppet and in turn help shape the DevOps and software delivery market as well. It takes a confident founder to bring in a real professional to help run the business to allow you to do what you do best. Many are too insecure to share management with a newcomer who “just wouldn’t love their baby the way they do.” Kudos to Luke for recognizing this move for the long term good of the company.

Project Blueshift– Many people are focusing on Blueshift’s capabilities of using Puppet with container technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, Meseosphere, CoreOS, etc. While Blueshift does focus on this as of the release today, there is actually more to it than that. Blueshift is really a collaboration between the Puppet community and the company itself to ensure that Puppet will always be able to help companies adopt next-generation infrastructure technologies. While today those next-gen technologies are container related, the idea is to grow Blueshift into something capable of working with new technologies as they emerge. It is a longer range project beyond 2-3 years, instead looking at what could be on the horizon 5-10 years from now. It is an ambitious vision. It is always hard to know what is the next big thing. But the fact that Puppet is even attempting to keep its eye on this is commendable.

Upgrades to Puppet Enterprise and Puppet Orchestrator – Mixed in all of the news is that Puppet has released upgrades to its Enterprise product and the Orchestrator product that was released last year. Without going into a feature by feature recap (you can read the link to the PR if you like), Puppet continues to polish their enterprise products as part of their maturation.

Integrations with Splunk and HipChat – As DevOps matures, the market will want greater integration between their tools. Puppet has taken a nice step in that direction by releasing a Splunk App that will allow you to automate set up of Splunk servers and give greater visibility into enterprise DevOps environments.

The HipChat integration allows your Puppet Orchestration management to show up right in the HipChat GUI and allows users to manage it from within HipChat. A nice bonus is the access rights which make sure that those without permission do not have access to the Puppet Orchestration data.

All in all, this is a major step up by Puppet. To be fair, the folks at Chef have also been taking steps to further mature their product and organization. As DevOps continues to grow, I am sure we will see some of the other DevOps tools startups follow the leaders here in maturing and growing along with the DevOps market.

April 8, 2016
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.

April 4, 2016
Trusting Continuous Delivery
DevOps, continuous delivery and the pipeline for faster software development are fundamentally different from traditional software development. It’s such a different approach and a different culture that it can take some time before Dev and Ops teams embrace and trust it—a necessary step for DevOps to make progress in any organization. By mixing containers and their value proposition into DevOps, this new software creation and deployment paradigm can readily foster that trust.

What Continuous Delivery Brings

DevOps and continuous delivery offer application development using containers, providing the required level of trust to get over that hump and move things forward. According to David N. Blank-Edelman, a DevOps veteran and currently technical evangelist at Apcera, the following container features lead to trust because they answer Dev and Ops concerns:
- Containers are resource-friendly replacements for virtual machines, built to encase the coder’s development environment
- Containers are the complete package format replacement, possessing everything you need to run an app
- Containers create an abstraction that enables development and its results to sit in a host in any of a number of infrastructures including on-premise and inside any of several public cloud providers
- Containers are the fastest means to launch short-lived, purpose-built testing sandboxes as part of a continuous integration process
- Containers are the end result of a build pipeline (artifact-to-workload)
- Containers form the boundary for loosely coupled components as part of a larger app or service. Such is the case, for example, when each part of a microservice-based app lives in its own container
According to Blank-Edelman, the aforementioned features imbue trust because they satisfy the following Dev and Ops queries:
- Is the container allocated to use only the resources it should?
- What resides in that container / workload?
- Where did that container come from? Is it OK from a security, coding and business requirements perspective?
- Where is the container permitted to live and run such as in what cloud, environment, country, and in proximity to other containers technically?
- Can the container communicate with only the things it should such as other containers and any hypervisor or other management resource? “If I move the container to another location, do the answers to these same questions still apply?” asks Blank-Edelman.
Though these questions express concerns in direct and simple language, experienced DevOps engineers who have felt the frustration of building development processes and attendant infrastructure understands these are difficult questions to satisfy. Without modern containerization efforts to sustain DevOps, development and production goals grow further out of reach.

The Importance of Policies

As containers undergird DevOps and continuous delivery, policies support containers. Developers input changes and innovations in code to the continuous delivery pipeline. Developers then respond to the needs of the growing code in a nurturing fashion, fixing errors and enabling new features. This pipeline works when automation, together with each progressive step in the development process, lays a foundation for the next step in a predictable and reliable manner.

“Here’s where it gets tricky: First, not only do you have to be able to answer the trust-related questions for each step, but it is entirely possible (and entirely likely in an enterprise environment) that different people/teams will share control of and input to each step on that path,” says Blank-Edelman. With so much collaborative effort in play juggling all these pieces, policies are necessary to configure these steps, address networking and other elements, and control the component parts of the process ahead of time and everywhere along the way.

Policies that make particularly good container watchdogs include those that set steps in the DevOps/continuous delivery pipeline apart, hemming them in on all sides. “Just like having your papers in order makes for an easier border crossing when you travel abroad, so, too, does having your policies reflect the trust required to move from one step to another,” says Blank-Edelman.
March 28, 2016
Flash Mob Inflection: Rugged DevOps Revolution

Truthfully, I was never a huge fan of the HBO series “The Sopranos.” It’s not that it wasn’t entertaining; I just didn’t agree with the “best ever” label that so many espoused during the show’s halcyon days.

This had something to do with living in Hoboken, N.J., at the time and feeling the show was a heavily glamorized caricature of the real-life Mafioso I still perceived to be in my midst. More specifically, it’s hard for anything mob-related to stand up next to “Goodfellas” and “The Godfather”—among my favorite films, ever.

Either way, I currently find myself identifying with the series’ defining sentiment (copped directly from The Godfather, but hammered home as The Sopranos main theme): “Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in.”

It wasn’t that I assumed that I’d never delve back into the domain of IT security after transitioning into the DevOps market last year; leveraging DevOps methodologies to improve security, policy compliance and related workflows stands as a core element of the overall movement.

But, in recent months and weeks it has become increasingly obvious that the security facet of the larger DevOps revolution appears poised for explosion as the buzz around emerging best practices, business models and solutions providers grows from a low hum into a steady roar.

After spending a few days talking DevOps security with Derek Weeks of Sonatype at CA World ’15 (we were booth neighbors and dinner mates) and giving more consideration to his company’s angle on securing the systems development life cycle (SDLC) supply chain, the internal gears really got spinning.

Regardless of whether you buy into Sonatype’s security-heavy approach, the concept of aggressively and proactively addressing security across the DevOps spectrum makes infinite sense. The ultimate downfall of applications security has always been the challenge of securing all the underlying layers of code (and today, microservices), especially as applications are assembled using heavier doses of shared, open source componentry.

As further evidence, nearly every major solutions vendor focused on the DevOps space—whether oriented toward the vibrant application performance management (APM), configuration management and continuous testing segments, among many others—seems to have launched some initiative aimed at integrating security into their products.

The rise of security capabilities adjacent to—and supporting inclusion into—the DevOps world, such as container giant Docker’s Content Trust initiative, along with the advancement of related startups including Twistlock, Scalock and StackRoxs, offers more proof of this growing momentum. And that’s only the container security piece of the puzzle.

Of course, there are also a number of emerging startups aimed at addressing the DevOps security opportunity, backed by well-known venture capitalists. A shortlist might include providers such as Immunio, Prevoty and UpGuard (formerly known as ScriptRock, which recently rebranded itself under the guise of a “DevOps security” provider), and we’re sure to see many more. And don’t forget the growing emphasis on DevOps security among established security industry stalwarts such as CyberArk, Snort and Tripwire, among others.

For a comprehensive list of the various types of DevOps security best practices and tools that we should expect to see gain wider adoption, this October 2015 blog by noted security analyst Adrian Lane of Securosis serves as a basic framework. Each of the areas of focus that he cites clearly offers significant opportunity for both new and existing methodologies.

Finally, one need look no further than this year’s RSA Security Conference, to be held in San Francisco at this end of this month, as tacit proof of the continued growth of what people now varyingly refer to as DevSecOps or Rugged DevOps (I prefer the latter as it just sounds cooler).

In addition to multiple conference sessions, notably a “DevOps Throwdown” between security industry veterans Caleb Sima, Chris Wysopal and Gary McGraw, there’s also the 2nd Annual DevOps Connect: Rugged DevOps Edition. If last year’s event is any indication (standing room only, venue literally at max capacity), this daylong DevOps security track at RSA will be an even more high-profile element of the entire week.

Further, if DevOps security—or, at the very least, the growing focus on adjacent segments such as container security—isn’t the unofficial theme of this year’s entire RSA show, I’d be extremely surprised.

Meanwhile (self-serving), my employer CA Technologies absolutely has a lot going on that complements and contributes to this growing DevOps Security market momentum.

For all of those reasons, here I find myself again, drawn closer back into the security space that I’ve called home for roughly the last decade. I guess that’s just how it goes, as DevOps and security are inarguably two of the most significant trends in IT these days and inextricably linked at their respective cores.

There are definitely worse fates out there. But, just when you think you’re out …

February 19, 2016
Live Blogging Container World

February 17, 2016
Will Microservices Make the ‘Ops’ in ‘DevOps’ Obsolete?

DevOps is a portmanteau of “developers” and “operations.” The concept of DevOps is about shifting IT culture in a way that enables developers and operations to work together more seamlessly. As more and more elements of DevOps become automated and leverage microservices such as container platforms, though, the operations side of that equation plays a diminished role.

Microservices and Automating Ops

What you’re left with essentially is developers with the processes and tools to automate the infrastructure back end. Technologies such as containers and services such as AWS Lambda simplify greatly the process of programmatically generating, modifying and maintaining the underlying infrastructure.

AWS Lambda seems to be a step toward removing the Ops from DevOps. It creates a system for use and runs code via APIs. The instance is spun up, the code is run and the instance is spun back down. AWS Lambda can decrease provisioning time and enable developers to be even more efficient than working with traditional virtual machines in partnership with operations.

Container technologies such as Docker allow applications to be broken down into very granular elements—many of which can be leveraged repeatedly. The ability to reuse containerized functions across different apps and to drive that process through APIs enable substantially greater automation.

With each step forward in the evolution of DevOps, organizations find new bottlenecks or roadblocks, and then look for or develop solutions to address them. In this API-based, automated future, the APIs themselves become a challenge. Organizations have to find ways to effectively manage and update a rapidly growing library of APIs.

Ops Will Live On

If you work in operations, or aspire to someday work in operations, don’t fret: Operations still will exist on some level.

The role played by operations will simply evolve. “Operations is not going away, but the job is definitely changing,” says Shannon Williams, VP of Sales and Marketing at Rancher Labs. “Automation and microservices are technologies that are enabling operations teams to spend less time ‘firefighting’ to maintain configurations, etc., and more time on bigger-picture issues that will help improve performance and resiliency, [and] help bring down costs for the business.”

That’s a step in the right direction. In this future scenario—next-gen data center—those in operations will be able to invest their time in more valuable endeavors. They will be able to automate routine, mundane infrastructure tasks and focus on incorporating new technologies that enable the organization to derive greater value from DevOps and IT in general.

“What is going away is the time spent arguing about what went wrong, not operations itself,” Williams suggests. “Given the additional time that automation will free up for Ops, they can start to find ways to improve their specific business unit. They can now be focusing on optimizing for performance, costs, etc.”

Evolution of DevOps

I have pointed out before that every roadblock in DevOps is actually an opportunity. As DevOps principles are applied in new areas, and new tools are developed to automate more tasks, it just accelerates everything to the next bottleneck. Rinse and repeat.

To some extent, the infrastructure side of IT and DevOps are two of those roadblocks. That’s why tools are emerging to allow many components of infrastructure to be automated, freeing the operations team to focus its efforts on whatever the next roadblock is.

January 26, 2016
A Containers Angst

— ROELBOB

October 26, 2015