CoreOS Ramps Up The News As The Vendors Pick Their Sides In The Container Wars.
Rocket, a new rival to cloud-computing service Docker designed the service’s former supporters, has scored big by allying itself with search giant Google, it was recently announced.At the CoreOS Fest conference today, CoreOS solidified support for the App Container spec (appc) for building and defining container applications, while also announcing that it is extending the functionality of the Quay container registry for private cloud deployments.
An application container specification that defines how to build and run pre-packaged apps has gained some big-name backing as an ecosystem emerges to “secure the backend of the Internet,” roll out distributed systems and bring web-like scaling to the enterprise. Containerization not only puts at risk a number of vendors (think those who make their money from virtualization) but it fundamentally promises to enable a business transformation as well. With cloud computing and app development tools have come together in a spectacular way as of late, and the biggest success story so far arguably takes the form of Docker, a cloud-based environment that provides a standardized environment to both designing, distributing and running apps across a variety of platforms. The virtualization company, in fact, led some of the initial research into container technology way back when its virtual machine was “the next big thing” to hit the enterprise, and it is now tickled pink that companies like Docker are able to leverage the idea into a potentially lucrative revenue stream. CoreOS founder and CEO Alex Polvi felt that Docker had strayed from its original mission, and with Rocket, he and his colleagues hoped to bring that mission back to the fore.
Because if the company cannot successfully incorporate containers into its virtualization and cloud platforms, it runs the very real risk of losing its “first among equals” status in the emerging enterprise data environment. CoreOS announced an application container runtime called Rocket recently along with new security features and a mechanism for tracking applications containers.
Five months later, Google has put its considerable weight behind this effort, officially joining the Rocket open source project and rolling the technology into one of its cloud computing tools. Of course containers or their applicability to composable architectures, have existed for going on ten years since Google offered an upstream change to Linux back in 2006. At the conference, Google specifically announced appc support in the Kubernetes project by making rkt available as a configurable container runtime for Kubernetes clusters. Polvi is set to announce Google’s involvement this morning at an event in San Francisco, and in an email to WIRED, Google has confirmed its involvement. The chief advantage is that VM-supported containers afford the enterprise a high degree of flexibility when it comes to assigning workloads to the appropriate resource architecture.
Since then the Docker ecosystem has grown hugely with lots of startup activity and plenty of funding – Docker itself is now valued at a billion or so dollars. Basically, Docker is a way of more efficiently building and operating services akin to Google Search, Google Maps, and Gmail—services that run across tens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of machines. Kelsey Hightower, product manager and chief advocate, CoreOS, says Quay supports both rkt and Docker images, which CoreOS is betting will both be used within enterprise IT environments. CoreOS, for instance, recently unveiled its Tectonic platform, which leverages the Linux OS and Google’s Kubernetes management system to provide a scale-out solution for companies that do not necessarily need to take it to hyperscale levels just yet.
Docker proponent Red Hat welcomed the CoreOS spec, noting that “fragmentation of approaches and formats runs the risk of undercutting the momentum” building behind container adoption. You can think of it as a shipping container for software—a tool that lets developers neatly package their code and spread it across a vast array of machines, whether those machines are running in their own data centers or atop public cloud computing services from the likes of Amazon.
Interest in private cloud implementations of Quay is rising, says Hightower, because IT organizations want to make sure that intellectual property doesn’t wind up accidentally being downloaded via a public container registry. The entire package entails a server OS, container networking and runtime tools and a browser-based cluster management system designed to guide workflows through the environment. The battle lines are obvious and, apart from a few vendors who are straddling both the Docker and CoreOS worlds, most parties seem to be choosing one side or the other.
CoreOS says that while Docker began life as a common container format used throughout the cloud computing industry, the evolution of the product has reached an unwieldy and complex creature that is poised to provide too much support to its parent company instead of its clients. When ServerWatch’s Paul Rubens asked key VMware executives why, the answer was that CoreOS management combined with the open-VM capabilities of VMware Tools offers a powerful combination to oversee environments that are still running atop VMware’s virtualization layer. Kurma is described as an execution environment for running applications in containers, providing a framework for managing and orchestrating containers. As that process occurs, IT operations teams will find themselves being asked to deploy all kinds of new operations software to support containers running on physical and virtual servers inside and out of any number of cloud computing environments.
By running containers within the virtual machine, enterprises gain high degrees of performance and isolation, plus broad third-party development support for advanced functions like virtual networking and software-defined storage. Kurma joins a growing list of implementations that include the JetPack runtime from FreeBSD and libappc, a C++ library for using containerized applications, Core OS said.
The appc spec emphasizes application container security, portability and modularity. rkt (formerly known as Rocket) is CoreOS’s container runtime and is the first implementation of appc. In short, as long as the enterprise stack sits on top of a VMware virtual machine, the company is happy to play ball with whoever comes up with an innovative management solution.
But what happens when organizations follow the plan currently laid out by the cloud industry and adopt a more application/services-centric approach to IT? With a container-based solution, the apps fit directly within the container, removing a layer of complexity that operators and/or automation systems would otherwise have to deal with in order to implement a highly dynamic application environment. The company’s Project Lightwave and Project Photon are both designed to “cradle” cloud-native apps by Docker, Pivotal and others, according to eWeek’s Chris Preimesberger, which should go a long way toward supporting the app-centric enterprise. Quay is an advanced registry that can be run behind a firewall, allowing companies to maintain security and take advantage of container-based systems. Still, the rationale behind this is to support greater functionality and infrastructure elasticity by layering OS, security and other functions between the container and the underlying virtual infrastructure.
Cole has been covering the high-tech media and computing industries for more than 20 years, having served as editor of TV Technology, Video Technology News, Internet News and Multimedia Weekly. His contributions have appeared in Communications Today and Enterprise Networking Planet and as web content for numerous high-tech clients like TwinStrata, Carpathia and NetMagic.