Cloud-native applications often involve container-based environments. Cloud-native technologies are used to develop applications built with services packaged in containers, deployed as microservices, and managed on elastic infrastructure through agile DevOps processes and continuous delivery workflows. The cloud native technology stack is classified into core infrastructure, operations, and management tools. The foundation for core infrastructure is based on container runtime, orchestration engine, cloud native storage, and networking layers. The operations and management tools enable developers and operators to manage the lifecycle of cloud native apps. Container platforms deliver essential building blocks such as logging and monitoring, security, integration, and deployment tools along with development environments.

Enterprises embracing microservices need a robust management and orchestration platform. Similar to Cloud Management Platforms (CMP) such as OpenStack, VMware vCenter, and Microsoft System Center; container management platforms are responsible for provisioning and orchestrating containers. This new category of software, known as Enterprise container platform, delivers the required scale and maturity to manage containerized workloads in production environments. Enterprise container platforms take container management to the next level by delivering end-to-end management capabilities.

This report introduces the importance of enterprise container platforms for building and running modern applications. It also evaluates significant players in the category. The objective of this report is to enable enterprise decision makers in selecting the right technology partner for their container platform requirements.

The scope of the report does not include hosted container platforms that are exclusively managed by cloud vendors. The key criterion for including a vendor is the ability to deploy the software platform turnkey in both enterprise datacenters and at least one public cloud IaaS platforms.

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An organization that embraces microservices has a diverse range of platforms and tools to choose from. The success of the project depends on choosing the right set of tools aligned with the business use case.

Both enterprises and web-scale companies are migrating to the cloud. While cloud is definitely the first step in realizing the potential of dynamic infrastructure, it is DevOps that delivers the promise of agility. The next milestone in realizing the full potential of cloud is microservices.

With the advent of containers, platform vendors, developer tooling companies, infrastructure service providers, and system integrators have started to offer newer products and services to enterprises. Most of the software built using containers based on the newer platforms and services utilizes microservices pattern.

This report introduces the benefits of adopting microservices along with an overview of the technology stack that is essential to run microservices-based applications.

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The current enterprise IoT market is comprised of web-scale public cloud providers, traditional industrial automation companies, and independent software vendors (ISV).

Customers must consider multiple factors while choosing the right IoT platform for their business needs. Enterprises have varied requirements ranging from managing the device lifecycle, integration with existing asset management, and processing device data for predictive analytics. It is important to understand that a mature IoT offering goes beyond connecting devices to the cloud for essential machine-to-machine communication. A mature IoT offering enables tighter integration with the data platform and the rest of the cloud services portfolio to deliver rich analytics and business intelligence. Unlocking the data and gaining insights becomes the most valuable outcome for any organization investing in an IoT solution.

This report analyzes the IoT Platform as a Service (PaaS) market landscape with an objective of helping decision makers choose the right offering. It highlights the key attributes of an industrial IoT offering while assessing the capabilities and maturity of cloud-based IoT vendors against each attribute.

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Customers must consider multiple factors while choosing the right IaaS platform for their business needs. Enterprises have varied requirements ranging from the ability to run legacy applications, integration with existing infrastructure, deploying cloud-native applications, and running Big Data workloads. It is important to understand that a mature IaaS offering goes beyond provisioning virtual machines in the cloud.

This report attempts to analyze the IaaS market landscape with an objective of helping CXOs choose the right IaaS offering. It highlights the key attributes of an enterprise infrastructure service while assessing the capabilities and maturity of public cloud IaaS vendors against each of the attributes.

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With the increasing storage choices in the public cloud offered by multiple providers, customers need guidance on choosing the right vendor and the right storage option.

This report offers comprehensive guidance to CXOs and decision makers in choosing the right cloud storage technology. It helps enterprise customers understand the public cloud storage technology choices along with the market landscape.

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The technology decision makers from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies are watching this trend with keen interest. Most of the recent surveys point to an increased adoption of containers in enterprises.

The rise of Docker has resulted in the creation of a new market segment in the industry. While traditional vendors with storage, networking, security, and monitoring offerings are gearing up to support containers, new opportunities have emerged in the form of container management platforms. One of the evolving categories in this space is container orchestration.

Enterprises embracing containers need a robust management and orchestration platform. Similar to the Cloud Management Platforms (CMP) such as OpenStack, VMware vCenter, Microsoft System Center, container management platforms are responsible for provisioning and orchestrating containers. This new breed of software delivers the required scale and maturity to manage containerized workloads in production environments. CaaS or Containers as a Service takes container management to the next level by delivering end-to-end management capabilities.

This Sector Roadmap identifies and categorizes the principal disruption vectors at play and profiles some significant providers in the space. Key findings include the following:

• The CaaS market comprises vendors from three key markets: Infrastructure companies, pure-play CaaS vendors, and PaaS players.
• Over the next 24 months, the CaaS market will be disrupted by five Disruption Vectors: application lifecycle management of contemporary apps, workload portability achieved through the decoupling of data and infrastructure, the ability to co-exist and interoperate with traditional line-of-business-applications, platform extensibility driven by a vibrant ecosystem, and the integration with established DevOps processes and tools.
• In the coming years, the lines between CaaS and PaaS will blur, and vendors will create a more integrated development stack to deliver unified application lifecycle management (ALM) features.

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With over 10 acquisitions, 15 executive transitions, and more than a dozen companies getting funded, the fourth quarter of 2014 saw many new developments that will make for a busy first quarter of 2015.

Highlights from the quarter include:

• We saw a rift in the open-source Linux container ecosystem when Canonical and CoreOS split from Docker, Inc. and came out with their own implementation of application containers.
• The orchestrating and clustering of containers went mainstream, with Amazon and Google officially launching container-based compute services.
• The OpenStack market continued to consolidate, as evidenced by EMC’s acquisition of Cloudscaling and Cisco’s interest in MetaCloud.
• Hadoop-as-a-Service providers Altiscale and Qubole made news for closing impressive rounds of funding.
• The race to the bottom continues, with cloud providers competitively cutting prices. The fourth quarter of 2014 saw yet-another round of price cuts from Google and Amazon.
• Major industry events — AWS re:Invent, Dreamforce, DockerCon Europe, Google Cloud Platform Live, HP Discover, Oracle OpenWorld, and OpenStack Summit — happened this past quarter, leading to many announcements about new services and features.

Thumbnail image courtesy of samxmeg/iStock.

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While there are proven, enterprise-ready frameworks and platforms for developing and deploying traditional desktop applications, the mobile application development landscape is still evolving. Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) attempts to fill the gap between traditional application platforms and mobile applications. It is the new middleware, exposing APIs and functions that enable developers to rapidly build new mobile apps and mobile-enable legacy enterprise applications.

The last two years witnessed unprecedented growth of mobile backend platforms. Facebook’s acquisition of Parse created a consumer-focused giant, with the social network’s thriving mobile ecosystem helping Parse attract the casual-focused mobile-gaming developer community. Other prominent startups and mobile specialists such as AnyPresence, Appcelerator, FeedHenry, Kinvey, Kii, and Kony are focused on the enterprise space, and traditional platform companies including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat are also vying for market share. At the same time, public-cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google, VMware, Pivotal, and Salesforce are adding mobile-friendly abstraction layers to their architectures, creating a market as cluttered as it is fast-moving.

This Sector Roadmap identifies and categorizes the principal disruption vectors at play and profiles a number of significant solution providers in the space. Key findings include:

• The MBaaS market is comprised of vendors from four key markets: pure-play mobile backends, traditional MEAP/MADP providers, PaaS vendors, and API enablers.
• Over the next 24 months, the MBaaS market will be disrupted by five Disruption Vectors: a convergence of features from multiple products, a growing importance of mobile-first development, a need for increased control of data assets, a need to unlock corporate data silos, and the growing influence of DevOps and Agile methodologies in mobile development.
• In the coming years, the lines between MBaaS and PaaS will blur, and vendors will create a more integrated development stack. In the near term, enterprises should meet their needs with MBaaS offerings that provide the greatest flexibility in deployment and tool choice.

Key:

• Number indicates companies relative strength across all vectors
• Size of ball indicates company’s relative strength along individual vector

Source: Gigaom Research

Thumbnail image courtesy of Scanrail/iStock.

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Many developers interchange the terms “container” and “Docker,” sometimes making it difficult to distinguish between the two, but there is a very important distinction. Docker, Inc. is a key contributor to the container ecosystem in the development of orchestration tools and APIs. While container technology has existed for decades, the company’s open-source platform, Docker, makes that technology more accessible by creating simpler and more powerful tools. Using Docker, developers and system administrators can efficiently manage the lifecycle of tens of thousands of containers.

This report provides a detailed overview of the Linux container ecosystem. It explains the various components of container technology and analyzes the ecosystem contributions from companies to accelerate the adoption of Linux-based containers.

Thumbnail image courtesy of malerapaso/iStock.

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Compared to re:Invent 2013, this year saw AWS transform into a bigger, bolder and more ambitious company that’s determined to become a formidable force in industry. During his keynote, Andy Jassy, SVP at AWS, emphasized that cloud is the new normal while sharing some staggering numbers related to his company’s growth. Amazon S3 is experiencing 127% YoY growth in data transfer. Amazon EC2 is growing at the rate of 99% each year. And none of this includes Amazon.com’s usage.

There are over a million customers using AWS with hundreds of system integrators offering professional services. According to Jassy, over 900 government agencies and 3400 academic institutions are using AWS’ cloud. AWS Marketplace, which acts as an exchange for launching software stacks on AWS, has over 1900 listed products across 23 categories. AWS is the fastest growing enterprise IT vendor with over 40% YoY growth.

Based on the last few major announcements from AWS — Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon Zocalo and AWS Directory Service — which were squarely focused on enterprise, the industry expected AWS to continue this focus with new enterprise services. While AWS did announce these, it took a balanced approach by also targeting developers and operations professionals. This year’s re:Invent announcements are proof that AWS is still a developer-centric company and it hasn’t wandered too far from its roots.

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