EMA Research Blog: Navigating IT and Security Horizons

Here's the Sneak Peak to the EMA Container Management in Production and at Scale research project that so many of you have been asking about over the previous 2 months.

“We want everyday developers (...) to be able to use machine learning much more extensively.” This is Andy Jassy’s mantra targeted at making AWS the company that turns machine learning into a commodity, similar to what the company achieved for IaaS before. Within this context, the following two new offerings stood out of the glut of machine learning and IoT news at Re:Invent 2017.

Breaking the Triangle of Cost, Quality, and Speed

This year’s AWS Reinvent delivered major announcements in DevOps, machine learning and IoT. All of the announced capability aim to eliminate infrastructure as the bottleneck for enterprises to become ‘digital attackers’. Observing the nearly 50.000 developers, architects, and software operators that came to Reinvent showed us a significant degree of genuine excitement about Amazon helping enterprises release new software faster, at a higher quality and lower cost.

First Came Autonomic Computing
‘Autonomic Computing’ was the original concept of providing systems and apps with the power autonomously responding to unpredictable challenges. ‘Autonomic Computing’ came with all the right ideas (IBM deserves a good share of credit for defining this concept), but failed due to the same cultural and technological barriers DevOps is struggling with today. There simply was not enough ‘pressure to innovate.' This allowed inertia to prevail, leading to 'business as usual,' instead of magical self-healing and self-optimizing datacenter infrastructure.

This year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) in San Francisco was carried by the enthusiasm of 1500 practitioners who were genuinely enthusiastic about how DevOps can transform their enterprises into a ‘digital attacker.’ Digital attackers rely as DevOps as their innovation engine to rapidly release high quality software that offers measurable business value. In short, digital attackers bully their competition by offering best in class customer value on an continuous basis and in a cost effective manner.

Despite what you hear from trolls, bigots, and misogynists, diversity in the technology industry is a good thing. But the philosophy of diversity needs more champions. Tech companies and IT organizations need to expand their workforce beyond the herds of white men that have dominated the industry for decades.

On October 25, Cisco and Google announced their hybrid cloud partnership, where Google brings the container runtime (Kubernetes), the platform to provide, manage, and consume APIs (Apigee), and of course a wide range of consumable cloud services (visual recogngition, machine learning, text to voice, etc.). Cisco contributes the hyperconverged infrastructure (Hyperflex) with Kubernetes management (Harmony), networking (Nexus 9k), and hybrid cloud management software (CloudCenter) to integrate Google’s public cloud services with the customer’s local data center.

Azure Container Service (now AKS where the K stands for Kubernetes) is now offers managed Kubernetes as Tech Preview. This new service provides single-line install (az aks create –n myCluster –g myResourceGroup), automated upgrades, self-healing, and scaling. Microsoft promises that the Azure control plane for Kubernetes will remain free (AWS charges for management servers), with customers only paying for worker nodes running applications. Like all other major vendors, Microsoft declares Kubernetes the winner of the container orchestrator and scheduler race and stresses its contribution to the open source project (only 37 commits, compared to 114 by IBM, 668 by Red Hat, and 1543 by Google as of October 25, 2017). Microsoft also stresses the importance of its Draft project (acquired through Deis) to make Kubernetes accessible to developers without any container experience. Today, Amazon does not offer managed Kubernetes, but it is expected that there will be an announcement in this regard at re:Invent in November.

What Happened?

Docker used the picturesque setting of its Copenhagen DockerCon event to announce Kubernetes support for both, Docker Enterprise Edition and Docker Community Edition. The company plans to deliver betas for end of 2017.