Apcera Says New Platform is Best for Enterprise Users of Containers

Apcera today announced a container orchestration solution called the Apcera Trusted Cloud Platform. The move comes just a week after popular container company Docker revealed it has integrated its Swarm orchestration solution into its latest release of Docker Engine and made other improvements to its solution to help customers better support production environments.

Nonetheless, Apcera indicates that Docker’s solutions don’t adequately meet enterprise users’ needs. And it says its new Apcera Trusted Cloud Platform does by providing multi-cloud overlay network and multi-infrastructure orchestration for security and application protection with a hyper-defined, policy-driven firewall around each application; operational policies to define container placement, resource consumption permissions, and enforcement of thresholds to protect against under- or over-provisioning of resources; and policy controls around container access to verify the integrity of a container image.

“Once Docker moves into enterprise production, your ability to monitor, update, govern and provide trust begins to break down almost immediately,” Apcera Chief Strategy Officer Mark Thiele said as noted in the company’s press release issued today. “The real Docker challenge is how to manage and secure so many moving parts in the wild. Until now, container management was not designed with the realities of Docker in production at scale, or multi and hybrid cloud, in mind. Because Apcera can securely run containerized workloads in production across any infrastructure, public or private, it is the most efficient, secure and scalable platform for making a container strategy truly enterprise-ready.”

In an interview with me last week at DockerCon, Apcera software architect Josh Ellithorpe said that Docker Swarm is good if you’re a very small business and are web based, but “if you look at it from an enterprise use case it falls flat.”

That’s in part, he said, because of the port assignments of the apps are done on a 1:1 basis, so if an organization has hundreds or thousands of apps, it doesn’t scale. The round-robin load balancing technique employed by Docker is also inefficient, said Ellithorpe. That’s because it sends traffic from all nodes back to a hub, even when that hub is far away and doesn’t add value, he explained. However, Apcera’s technology sets up the best routes for each containerized job, he said. Apcera’s instance manager can understand if an app is supposed to run in a given data center, if it is, it stays there; if not, the solution puts it in the most efficient location, he added.