ClusterHQ today announced the forthcoming availability of two products designed to facilitate data management for containers, namely, FlockerHub and Fli. FlockerHub enables teams to store data volumes for Docker containers independently of the containers themselves, thereby allowing teams to decouple the code that runs within containers from the data that feeds container-based applications. FlockerHub’s decoupling of container data volumes from containers allows customers to enhance their operational agility with respect to the transfer of container-based workloads across a multitude of environments such as public clouds, private clouds and on-premise infrastructures. Meanwhile, Fli allows users to version control the data stored within their FlockerHub deployments and subsequently track changes to a data volume. For example, customers can use Fli to understand the evolution of changes to a database that, over time, is differentially used in both a production and development deployment. In addition to tracking incremental backups, Fli enables teams to track branches in the evolution of code in ways that enhance the troubleshooting of anomalous application behavior. More generally, Fli helps developers manage parallel development streams that commences with a common database foundation by giving teams greater insight into the history of data used within container-based applications.
FlockerHub, however, constitutes the most important innovation introduced by ClusterHQ in today’s announcement because of its ability to simplify data management within container deployments. FlockerHub fills a gaping hole in the container management space by giving developers the capability to manage data volumes for container-based applications. Importantly, FlockerHub simplifies processes such as data backup and replication, whether for redundancy-related use cases or a use case such as the migration of container-based data from one environment to another by giving teams the ability to effectively manage data used in containers. FlockerHub users can manage the distribution of data to containers and track its subsequent utilization in an application. Furthermore, FlockerHub delivers role-based access control governance functionality to ensure that the right users have the privileges to distribute and track the utilization of data volumes by containers. Given the heterogeneity of container management platforms on the market today, ClusterHQ’s FlockerHub and Fli promise to take up a place of critical importance within the container landscape by addressing head on the problem of data management for containers, which up until now has largely been thrust back onto customers themselves, resulting in high degrees of complexity regarding the problem of managing data for containers. FlockerHub and Fli will be available as of November 8.
Filed under: Docker, Miscellaneous Tagged: ClusterHQ, containers, data volumes for containers 