Private cloud provider, ZeroStack, has announced a self-service capability from which developers can create their own workbenches. Forty developer tools from a mix of open source and commercial providers are available to users of the DevOps Workbench through Zerostack’s Intelligent Cloud Platform.
InfoQ asked Steve Garrison, VP of marketing and business development at Zerostack, to describe a workbench:
A workbench is a work environment for software developers. On the workbench, they have the tools and resources they need to build software in an agile manner. There are several characteristics of a workbench:
- Developers select tools from the workbench to build their own development environment
- Developers choose tools from the ZeroStack Z-AppStore
- Workload placement and quota management of resources (VMs / compute, storage, network) is automated
- The environment uses a secure, multi-tenant architecture – each tenant has a workbench
- Ops retains control of the infrastructure
- Placement of tools is accomplished through blue prints or templates based on Heat
Heat is a project in the OpenStack Orchestration program that implements an orchestration engine to launch multiple composite cloud applications based on templates in the form of text files that can be treated like code.
DevOps Tools developers can choose from the Z-AppStore include: Maven, Bitbucket, Jenkins, Ansible, Puppet and Chef. Big data applications such as Hadoop and Spark are also available as are SQL and NoSQL databases and application servers such as Apache and NGINX. Access to the Z-AppStore is via a browser, like public cloud. Garrison explains:
Each workbench is a construct that contains what each developer chooses, built up by provisioning virtual machines, and assigning resources to those virtual machines to support the applications chosen. For example, a user might have Jenkins as a CI/CD framework tool running on an Ubuntu virtual machine in one project area, and have OpenMake Continuous Deployment software running on a Cirros virtual machine in another project area.
InfoQ asked Garrison to describe the role of Ops in the DevOps Workbench:
The Ops team can extend the AppStore for other tools by modifying the templates in the AppStore, so that is a key role. Once a new template is in place, developers would click on the app logo as noted earlier to execute the orchestration, which deploys the app in question.
Jerome Brock, senior DevOps engineer at Zimperium, a provider of mobile threat defence (MTD) solutions, says about the Zerostack DevOps Workbench:
We are continually enhancing our software-defined mobile threat defense products, and we need to empower our developers with self-service, cloud-based tools. By integrating ZeroStack’s Intelligent Cloud Platform onto our bare-metal servers, we have created a self-service DevOps environment.