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Tag: Parallels Cloud Server

  • Deliver faster, but don’t sacrifice quality

    Deliver faster, but don’t sacrifice quality

    Developing applications, and deploying servers faster are great goals. Being agile and streamlined can give an organization a clear competitive advantage. However, faster does not equal better, and being speedy for the sake of being speedy can lead to avoidable mistakes. Faster is only better if you can achieve greater speed without sacrificing quality.

    At the same time companies are racing to be faster than their rivals, they’re also dealing with an increasingly complex IT infrastructure. IT environments are becoming highly heterogeneous—merging physical, virtual, and cloud platforms, and combining legacy systems with cutting edge technologies. The challenges of managing such a diverse IT infrastructure simply add to the potential issues that can arise as organizations try to work faster.

    That is where DevOps plays an important role. DevOps tools and technologies establish a process chain between development and deployment. It enables organizations and IT admins to reliably track and understand the components in use, and any changes or updates that occur. In order to achieve speed without sacrificing quality, it’s important to maintain as consistent an environment as possible, and to know exactly what has been changed.

    “For hypervisor based virtual images, this depends on the strict process around handling the images, but for container based virtual images depending on a cascading snapshot mount namespace, where there are layers of images built one on top of the other, strict handling becomes unnecessary because everyone can see transparently (via the image cascade) what changes at each stage of the process,” explained James Bottomley, CTO of server virtualization for Parallels. “This gives everyone in the DevOps chain the ability to verify each step and see the changes for themselves, leading to much higher assurance that the resulting deployment is correctly tested and released.”

    Ken Cheney, VP of business development for Chef, describes another way that DevOps helps boost speed without affecting quality. “Automation turns infrastructure into code. For example, Chef recipes automate all facets of management and orchestration—from provisioning bare-metal and cloud servers to automated configuration and application deployment. You can replace manual, slow, error-prone procedures with code that is versionable, testable and repeatable.”

    “When infrastructure is code you can test it just as you would applications—using automated tests that find problems early, before you release to production,” added Cheney.

    In its 2014 State of DevOps Report, Puppet Labs drew an interesting correlation between speed and quality. Essentially, Puppet Labs found that speed and quality become a self-feeding circle.

    “There’s a virtuous circle at work here: As stability improves, IT performance improves. This improved performance helps to create a better-functioning business that can pay attention to the communications and processes that enhance and improve stability.”

    The converse is also true. Poor quality results in issues, and necessitates allocating resources to troubleshoot and resolve problems, which impedes the speed at which an organization can function.

    DevOps tools and technologies enable organizations to streamline development, and work more efficiently without sacrificing quality. Businesses that attempt to work faster, without also working smarter by using DevOps are putting themselves at a disadvantage.

  • Native support for Docker apps coming soon to Parallels

    Native support for Docker apps coming soon to Parallels

    When I think of Parallels, the first thing that comes to mind is virtual machines. I have used Parallels for years as a means of running a virtualized instance of a Windows operating system from within Mac OS X. In addition to virtual machines, though, Parallels was also doing containers before containers were cool, and announced last week that it will soon include native support for Docker applications as well.

    Parallels was working with container technologies years ago with Virtuozzo and the open source OpenVZ platform. The company claims to be the most widely-deployed containers platform in the world, with over one million instances. With the launch of native Docker support, service providers will be able to provide container-based virtual private servers on the Parallels Cloud Server platform to customers that want to build with Docker applications. Parallels

    “A challenge customers face today is running Docker images in a virtualized environment based on a hypervisor,” explained James Bottomley, chief technology officer of virtualization for Parallels. “This takes a core benefit of Docker—that the applications run in containers at higher density and performance—and reduces that benefit considerably.”

    Bottomley added, “With Parallels solution, the service provider can offer the customer an environment where Docker is running on top of Parallels Cloud Server containers-based virtualization for optimal performance and at high-density.”

    Why does this matter? I spoke with Bottomley myself to get more information. He told me that the primary advantage of containers—particularly in the cloud—is they have different elasticity and density capabilities than a hypervisor. It is faster and easier to scale containers than entire virtual machines.

    There is a disadvantage as well. Bottomley stressed that container technology requires that all of the containers share the same kernel. So, it’s not possible, for example, to launch a Windows-based container on a Linux kernel, or a Linux-based container on a Mac OS X kernel.

    The inclusion of native Docker support in Parallels Cloud Server will be significant for smaller companies. Large enterprises like Microsoft or Amazon have virtually unlimited resources to invest in scalability. They can simply run container apps in separate hypervisor instances, and just continue to add more hypervisor instances to meet demand, but that is a costly and inefficient way to address scalability.

    With Docker apps running on Parallels Cloud Server, smaller cloud service providers will have a secure, high-density virtual server environment with the elasticity and scalability to compete with much larger public cloud providers. Bottomley told me that the Parallels solution with Docker containers reduces the physical server overhead by a factor of one-third.

    Philbert Shih, managing director, Structure Research agrees there is significant market opportunity for cloud service providers to deliver a cost-effective platform for developing and deploying Docker applications. “The answer lies in building an optimized infrastructure environment that is dense and scales, while being able to maintain high levels of performance and facilitate portability of workloads.”

    The Parallels announcement is just the latest in a string of victories for Docker. Microsoft added support for Docker containers on Linux virtual servers in Azure earlier this year, and recently announced a partnership with Docker to bring native container support to the next iteration of Windows Server.

    As the container concept gathers mainstream steam, though, Docker also faces increasing competition from rivals like Rocket. Expanding Docker’s sphere of influence with native support on popular, and widely-used platforms will help to cement it as the de facto leader of container apps.

    The update to Parallels Cloud Server to introduce native Docker support is expected in the first quarter of 2015.