Gartner (News - Alert) APM Study Ranks Dynatrace No. 1

Dynatrace this year again captured the lead position in Gartner Inc.’s report about application performance monitoring. The APM (News - Alert) vendor has more than 8,000 customers and reports double-digit growth. Meanwhile, the worldwide APM market as a whole grew 10.6 percent in 2015, reaching $2.7 billion.

Platform9 Offers Kubernetes Orchestration as a Managed Service

Platform9 over the summer unveiled a container management platform called Platform9 Managed Kubernetes. It’s delivered as a managed service, so businesses can offload the management, troubleshooting, and upgrades involved with running an orchestration solution. This solution, which was in beta in June, builds on the popular Kubernetes container orchestration solution by making it simpler to manage and providing service-level guarantees. Platform9 Managed Kubernetes is also noteworthy in that it supports both containers and virtual machines, said Madhura Maskasky, co-founder and vice president of product at Platform9, which she founded in 2013 with other former VMware engineers.

NetApp SolidFire Announces Docker Volume Plug-In

NetApp SolidFire at DockerCon in June unveiled the NetApp Docker Volume Plug-In, a universal driver for Docker that allows customers to save data across containers so that data continues to be available (even if the container with which it was associated isn’t) for other services that might need it, and for compliance purposes. The plug-in is now available on GitHub. “The number of use cases for persistent storage alongside containers is ever growing,” says NetApp SolidFire. “Our development work around Docker volume plug-ins makes deploying and managing storage more simple and intuitive. NetApp’s participation in several technology partner programs, including Docker’s Ecosystem Technology Partner program and Mesosphere’s Open DC/OS program, showcase our commitment to the broader container ecosystem.”

Survey Shows Need for Persistent Storage in Container Environments

Container adoption is real, and the problem of persistent storage is one of the key problems related to it that needs to be solved, according to Mohit Bhatnagar, vice president of product at ClusterHQ, which recently did a survey on this topic. ClusterHQ  sells an open source container data volume manager for Dockerized applications. It’s called Flocker, and it enables ops teams to run containerized stateful services like databases in production.

There’s been a nearly 100 percent increase in container usage in production since last year, said Bhatnagar, pointing out that of the 297 individuals who weighed in on this survey topic, 79 percent of them are running container technologies, and 76 percent of them are running container technologies in production. “It clearly shows containers are becoming part of an organization’s mission-critical architectures,” he added.

JFrog Introduces Pre-Production Software Visibility Tool

Seven-year-old JFrog has a new solution called Xray. Containers and other binaries and images need tools to be used and managed, and Xray provides the security piece of the puzzle to allow users to understand what impact new software will have on their environments before that software goes into production. It’s not just a container scanner, Xray also leverages information JFrog gets from security databases and other sources to get the job done. Xray sits between the developers and development operations engineers at organizations. It can present license information, flag out-of-date component information, and point out security vulnerabilities, and it optimizes user environments before they are pushed to production. By providing a view of vulnerabilities before software goes into production, it saves organizations money by saving them time. It saves them time by automating quality assurance and release verification processes.

Rancher Labs Gets New Funding

Rancher Labs recently raised $20 million in Series B funding led by new investor GRC SinoGreen. Existing investors Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in this new round. “We are seeing a lot of attention and demand for our Rancher platform and feel it is due to our unique approach to container management,” Sheng Liang, CEO of Rancher Labs, said in announcing the funding. “Containerization has enabled organizations to do amazing things to improve application performance, availability, and cost. The next pieces of this puzzle, which will really help to perfect container technologies, are the tools around the management of containers.” Rancher Labs provides an open source management platform that some of the largest companies in the world use to manage their container clusters; 10 percent of all the containers in production in the world leverage Rancher Labs technology.

Midokura Reveals Red Hat (News - Alert), Mirantis News

Midokura Enterprise MidoNet network virtualization technology is now certified with Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8. Midokura also recently announced its integration with Mirantis OpenStack 8.0 and Fuel, its open source deployment and control plane for OpenStack. That’s expected to help expedite the creation of Fuel and OpenStack 8.0 deployments.