ContainerCon Vendors Offer Flexible Solutions for Managing All Your New Micro-VMs

John S. Tonello — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 23:15:00 +0000

As you might expect, this week's LinuxCon and ContainerCon 2016, held in Toronto, is heavy on the benefits and pitfalls of deploying containers, but several vendors aim to come to the rescue with flexible tools to manage it all.

Take Datadog, a New York-based company that offers scalable monitoring of your containerized infrastructure—and just about everything else—from a single interface. This is an off-premise, cloud-based tool that can monitor tens of thousands of your hosts and integrate with stuff you already know, like AWS, Cassandra, Docker, Kubernetes, Postgre and 150 other tools.

Datadog's IaaS monitoring service works by running open-source agents on your physical, virtual or containterized hosts and returning graphical streams of data. Overlays can show you metrics from multiple services at once, perhaps showing you that traffic suddenly tanked on your webservers at the same time your databases stalled. Sign up for free monitoring of up to five hosts here.

Other LinuxCon/ContainerCon vendors are offering similar products that look to make life easier for anyone with hybrid environments of on-premise and cloud-based systems and applications.

Virtuozzo's latest offering is a comprehensive virtualization platform that allows you to deploy and manage any combination of operating systems, applications, VMs and containers. At the same time, Sysdig offers SaaS monitoring, troubleshooting and alerting for distributed containerized environments.

As with others, the key is enabling IT shops to mix legacy metal and VM monitoring with new container monitoring for easy management and quick troubleshooting. Sysdig's goal sums it up well: to make maintenance easy so "Ops teams can spend more time on the fun part of their jobs."

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Updates from LinuxCon and ContainerCon, Toronto, August 2016

John S. Tonello — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 13:00:00 +0000

by John S. Tonello

The Future of Linux: Continuing to Inspire Innovation and Openness

The first 25 years of Linux has transformed the world, not just computing, and the next 25 years will continue to see more growth in the Open Source movement, The Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin said during the opening keynote of LinuxCon/ContainerCon in Toronto on Monday, August 22, 2016.

"Linux is the most successful software project in history", Zemlin said, noting that the humble operating sytem created by Linus Torvalds 25 years ago this week is behind much of today's software and devices.

But the message of Linux is far more than software, Zemlin said. It's about the open exchange of ideas that's world-changing and inspiring. The concept of sharing has changed how the world thinks about technology and how it's made, he said.

"We've learned that you can better yourself while bettering others at the same time", he said. "We're building the greatest shared technology asset in the history of computing."

In the coming years, Zemlin predicts an even more rapid shift to open source, particularly in a world that now makes it nearly impossible to deploy software without collaborating and taking advantage of open resources.

The Linux Foundation itself seeks to build on the work of the past 25 years by working to create and support standards for security and open-source rights, and increasing the diversity of the Open Source movement, Zemlin said.

Vendor Spotlight: Anchore—Container Management with an Eye to Deployment

When it comes to deploying containers, it's still a bit of the Wild West—particularly if you're hosting a shared cluster. What's really inside each container? Is the OS current? Is the security sufficient? Are there unpatched bugs?

Anchore, one of the container-related sponsors at LinuxCon 2016 and ContainerCon being held this week in Toronto, seeks to change that. The company offers a product (now in beta) that aims to provide container image management and analytics. According to CTO and co-founder Daniel Nurmi, the Anchore tools allow you to create a set of standards and test your containers against those standards before you deploy them to production. If you have a shared environment, the tools can give you insight into the often opaque nature of containers. Learn more here.

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