ContainerX will launch their ‘Container Platform for Enterprise IT’ at DockerCon Europe next week in Barcelona. Described as ‘vSphere for Containers’ the platform aims to give developers a self service capability using the Docker command line, whilst providing operations teams with capabilities that they’re familiar with from managing virtual machines.
ContainerX’s platform will bring together different container formats (such as Docker and Rocket), orchestration technologies (e.g. Mesos, Aurora, Kubernetes and Swarm), storage mechanisms (e.g. Portworx and ClusterHQ) and networking systems. “We are the glue”, said their CEO Kiran Kamity, whilst recognising that enterprises are struggling to pick winners in individual categories and fearful of being stuck with obsolete tools in a fast moving technology domain.
The platform virtualises the implementation of clusters so that multiple virtual clusters can be run across a single unified resource pool. The system shares conceptual underpinnings with VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), but is designed to work with containers running on bare metal within customer data centres and public cloud based virtual machines. Administrators can over provision virtual clusters across the underlying resource pool, and prioritisation is then used to schedule the most urgent and important workloads.
ContainerX also claims to provide resiliency, by providing limits on resource usage (CPU and memory). The additional monitoring necessary to do that is achieved by deploying a privileged container onto each host. The platform also provides an administration console for operators.
The company’s founders come from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, and they’ve taken funding from VMware veterans Steve Herrod (now at General Catalyst) and Jerry Chen (Greylock). ContainerX will to some degree be competing with VMware’s ‘Cloud-Native Applications’ platform Photon, which was announced at VMworld in August.
