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The containerization market is filled with tech industry leaders as well as nascent companies with new ideas and container technologies.
The rise of Docker, for instance, helped define container technology, and since then, several startups emerged to fine-tune container technology, such as Kubernetes.
See below how five companies have deployed container technology to solve software problems around DevOps, security, content management, and high-performance computing:
Hasura
Hasura was initially destined to become a food-delivery marketplace; however, the founding team faced difficulties in building similar components to run the system and assembled a back-end toolkit as a short-term relief measure.
The plan went on to success, and rather than deploying the built components for their marketplace, Rajoshi Ghosh and Tanmai Gopal, co-founders of Hasura, created a database platform with NoSQL API to make the development cycle more manageable. Hasura offers container deployment across Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, and custom clouds, along with automatic migration.
“Using Hasura’s platform, developers can now create cloud-native, portable, and elastic applications within a few minutes, without knowing anything about Kubernetes in the beginning,” says Sameer Verma, managing director, Nexus Venture Partners.
“Usually it’s sysadmins looking at Kubernetes. But ultimately, the application developers will build applications on the Kubernetes substrate. We’re accelerating that process of taking Kubernetes to the application developer. Provided that everything (infrastructure configuration, application dependencies, environment configuration, stateful migrations, tests) is declarative, Git is the only tool developers need to drive their DevOps tasks.”
The CNCF-certified Hasura combines platform-as-a-service (PaaS) with back end-as-a-service (BaaS) to deploy tools by creating microservices, like data, filestore, and auth to back end tasks.
Industry: DevOps and cloud
Container technology provider: Hasura
Outcomes:
- Creating infrastructure for developers to automate GitOps, build API gateways, and develop data analysis
- Helping organizations create their own web apps, APIs, and microservices
- Eliminating the need to program boilerplate code through Python and data science self-starter kits
- Integrating programs as containers through Gitkube
- Empowering full-stack developers to take complete control of their end-to-end stack without much expertise
Acquia
Acquia is a Drupal self-host service provider. The cloud-driven content management system uses container technology through SignalFx to reduce downtime, monitor networks, and analyze logs.
“That has to run on a world-class platform. It has to be the most performing. It has to be the most secure. It needs to be flexible to enable customers to run Drupal however they want to. And so, that involves the ability to support thousands of modules that come out of the community,” says Charley Dublin, VP of product management, Acquia.
Acquia’s main selling proposition lies in creating customer-centric digital services for marketers or architects who don’t have any prior coding experience. Acquia’s customer base today includes BBC, Panasonic, and Vodafone.
Acquia used Kubernetes containers for powering 2018’s Winter Olympics, an Australian Open, and a World Cup.
Industry: Web content management platform
Container technology provider: Acquia, Acquia Cloud Next, Yesware, DigitalOcean, Concur, SpringCM Contract Management, Nexonia, and Expenses
Outcomes:
- Real-time data and tools optimization
- Automating digital products through failure detection, traffic rerouting, and an enhanced scalability
- Hands-on with Drupal and eradicating any fall-outs in the content management system
- Automated cloud scaling capacity and integration across Cron, Memcached, and Cloud Hooks
- Efficient MySQL databases and self-healing cloud infrastructure
- Easy identification of system vulnerabilities through cloud microservices with options of continuous and manual backups
NeuVector
San Jose, California-based NeuVector, part of SUSE, is an open-source container security system offering zero-trust capabilities by using a next-generation firewall.
NeuVector’s container security strategy spans across clouds and real-time environments, while offering traffic visibility and automated threat detection capabilities.
“As more enterprises migrate to cloud native infrastructure and Kubernetes, robust and automated security must be in place from day one, extend throughout the pipeline, and cannot impede the pace of application development,” says Gary Duan, CTO, NeuVector.
In discussing NeuVector’s efforts on container security, Brian Fox, CTO of Sonatype, says, “As container security becomes mission critical to DevSecOps, organizations mustn’t be just checking the box within an SCA solution. To realize the risk, customers need a holistic approach to analyze, monitor, and track their containers’ contents and run-time configurations.”
Moreover, NeuVector’s behavioral learning technology has led to successful partnerships with IBM, AWS, Red Hat, and Docker.
Industry: Cybersecurity
Container technology provider: RKE2 and SUSE NeuVector
Outcomes:
- Container life cycle management with enhanced protection from SQL injection, DLP violations, and DNS attacks
- Multiple teams monitoring risk solution across Kubernetes clusters through a centralized dashboard and options to isolate Prometheus metrics
- End-to-end container threat visibility and protection, virtual patching, and safeguarding workloads
- Freedom for enterprises to self-deploy clusters across a FIPS-compliant distribution
Sylabs
Sylabs was founded by Gerg Kurtzer, an open-source veteran and creator of CentOS. Kurtzer devised Sylabs’ first product, Singularity Pro, with the help of the U.S. Department of Energy to to help high-performance computing (HPC) products.
Singularity uses containerization to manage HPC clusters, expedite workloads from development into production, enable portability, perform advanced analytics and deep learning, and build a Docker-like road map for HPC environments.
“These applications carry data-intensive workloads that demand HPC-like resources, and as more companies leverage data to support their businesses, the need to properly containerize and support those workflows has grown substantially,” Kurtzer says.
Singularity extends compatibility across cloud platforms, like Azure to container orchestration tools, such as Mesos, Kubernetes, and Batch.
“Singularity Enterprise enhances the prospects for success by enabling teams to deliver production deployments rapidly,” Kurtzer says. “The flexibility granted through self-hosting allows our customers to deploy Singularity Enterprise on their terms — in their on-premises data centers, private clouds, and even hybrid cloud configurations.”
Industry: AI and high performance computing
Container technology provider: Singularity, Singularity Pro, and Warewulf
Outcomes:
- Building Singularity containers through SIF without accessing confidential information
- Container library to share SIF files and audit the versioned history
- Material exchange between millions of Singularity containers while verifying digital signatures
ChaosIQ
Chaos engineering is a development in DevOps. Netflix, for instance, embraced Titus as its container management platform and later deployed chaos engineering to stream videos, create personalized recommendations, encode content, and manage up to 200,000 clusters and 500,000 containers per day.
ChaosIQ uses concepts of chaos engineering to detect failures, bugs, crashes, and leaks before they appear. The enterprise monitors an entire product life cycle and breaks the infrastructure into actionable steps during production by exploring system weaknesses across all attack arenas.
“ChaosIQ aims to fit into your world to make it as easy and safe as possible to conduct valuable system verification and chaos engineering work using our Reliability Workflow across SaaS, single-tenant, and self-hosted options to choose the deployment as per your needs,” says Russ Miles, CEO, ChaosIQ.
ChaosIQ manages system nodes and persistent disks, performs real-time cost analysis and predictive maintenance, and builds redundancy across pods. The product can be integrated with a client’s CI/CD pipeline, while analyzing their vulnerability scores through ChaosIQ’s Scorecard system.
Industry: Chaos engineering
Container technology provider: Reliably
Outcomes:
- Bring down costs by early detection of vulnerabilities and attacks
- Reduction in system failure
- Better UX with better service availability
