Easily deploy and manage containerized applications with vRealize Automation, on any cloud!

 

The 2016 State of DevOps report showed that businesses adopting new ways of deploying and operating IT services are able to significantly outperform their competitors.

Using data from 4,800 IT professionals surveyed, the study showed that the highest-performing IT organizations can deploy applications 200X faster, with 3X fewer failures, and 24X faster recovery. This is a big deal!

While no single technology is a silver bullet, there are common patterns found among high performing IT organizations. Embracing DevOps to provide a high degree of automation is one of them. And within that, the usage of application containers to transform these DevOps organization is now seen as a significant trend.

In this post, we will introduce an exciting partnership between Nirmata and SovLabs that allows IT organizations to build on existing cloud management platforms, and rapidly provide value to their businesses!

Containers enable fast delivery

While containers have been around a long time, recent innovations from Docker, Inc. and their ecosystem are driving mass adoption.

Containers provide standards based packaging and runtime management for application components. Containers are fast to deploy and make efficient use of system resources. Developers get application portability and programmable image management, while the operations team gets standard runtime units for deployment and management.

All of the above equals agility, speed and potential cost savings around public cloud deployments.

Here are two real-world examples of the benefits of using Application Containers:

1. Shawn Bower, cloud architect at Cornell, speaks to a 10X savings in time using Docker to speed up many legacy applications
2. A 2015 Case Study involving Nirmata, VMware vSphere, and Docker showed cutting down deployment time for a custom application, from several hours to just a few minutes

Container adoption challenges

With every new technology comes an adoption challenge. Enterprise IT teams have invested heavily in existing tools and processes which at this time prevent a costly rip out and rebuild. Hence, for enterprise adoption it is necessary for new technologies to work well with existing solutions.

A lot has happened in IT, in the last decade!  In the early 2000s, VMware transformed the data center through virtualization and software defined compute, storage, and networking. In 2006, Amazon launched Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and rapidly made the AWS public cloud a compelling choice. Since then, Microsoft, Google, and several others have also launched full-featured enterprise IaaS solutions.

Enterprises are adopting multiple clouds, to avoid lock-in, for compliance and regulatory reasons, and to allow the ability to choose the best public or private cloud solutions for their workloads. A 2016 survey showed that hybrid cloud adoption has gone up from 58 percent to 71 percent year-over-year.

To deal with the complexities of managing multiple clouds, enterprises are choosing Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs) that offer consistent way of providing access management, governance, metering, chargebacks, service orchestration, and service optimization across multiple clouds.

The figure below, from Gartner, shows how a CMP can help manage public and private clouds:

The CMP gap

The end goal of the infrastructure services is to enable efficiencies at the application layer!

In the last 12-18 months, application container technologies have dramatically changed the way applications are deployed and managed. This applies to both 3rd party applications as well as custom developed applications.

CMPs designed to manage virtual machine based applications are not suited in managing the highly dynamic application lifecycles of containerized applications. A new approach is needed to extend CMPs so they can continue to provide enterprises with a strong ROI, and leverage the full benefits of application containers.

“With the advent of container orchestration starting to disrupt the software development life cycle, CMP vendors are reassessing their value proposition in light of application definition being removed from their system to the container orchestration system.”

— Gartner, Market Guide for Cloud Management Platforms

Bringing container management to vRA

Nirmata has partnered with SovLabs to create a unique offering that allows Enterprise IT teams to leverage their existing investments as well as embracing the benefits of application containerization!

About SovLabs:

As hybrid cloud adoption continues to rise, organizations struggle with delivering systems and applications across the increasingly complex landscape of tools, process, and infrastructure cloud components.  SovLabs was formed in July of 2014 to help customers quickly and easily address these cloud management challenges at scale with purpose-built software integrations and product extensions.

SovLabs suite of products extend vRealize Automation’s core capabilities and enable organizations to quickly transform from high-touch, manual and semi-automated processes to ultra-efficient, cloud-based service delivery models that better address business challenges.

About Nirmata:

In September 2013, recognizing the need for a new way of managing cloud-native applications, we founded Nirmata to transform the way enterprise applications were deployed and operated. Nirmata’s mission is to democratize the use of DevOps best practices for all enterprises.

At Nirmata, we believe that cloud-native applications require cloud native management and that enterprises developers should be free to choose any cloud, without the heavy lifting of deploying and operating complex tooling. We have built Nirmata as a secure and highly-scalable, always-on cloud service that is extremely easy to use, lightweight and non-intrusive.

The Solution

Nirmata and SovLabs together provide enterprises with a means to easily adopt application containers for existing applications or for new cloud-native applications. Together, the solution provides:

1. A single pane of glass, built on the proven vRealize Automation suite, to manage both VM and containerized applications.
2. Seamless provisioning of public and private cloud infrastructure services as well as complex provisioning of related resources across categories such as IPAM, DNS, directory services, load balancers, app config management solutions, service management, etc.
3. Consulting and training services to containerize existing applications or launch greenfield development of cloud-native applications

Next Steps

Find out more details about our solution on VMware Solution Exchange.
Download eBook: Containerizing Traditional Applications
Request a demo

Looking forward to hearing from you!

David Coulter, SovLabs & Jim Bugwadia, Nirmata