Suddenly the subject of “containers” has moved from the realm of IT into the realm of manufacturing IT (aka OT). One company held a press conference at the decidedly OT-oriented ARC Forum last February. If you are new to containers, check out Kubernetes.
Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.
The complex dance among several of the IT suppliers regarding manufacturing IoT has been fascinating. Dell jumped in, but following a less-than-stellar-result from its EMC acquisition has pretty much jettisoned anything to with IoT. HPE has shuffled things and people, but it remains a player bringing together its edge computing and wireless technologies showing signs of life. The third one I’ve worked with is Hitachi Vantara. This recently formed subsidiary of Hitachi has some solid technology and market awareness. It is another one to watch.Speaking of
Hitachi Vantara, the wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi that focuses on building hardware and software to help companies manage their data, it has announced acquiring the assets of Containership, one of the earlier players in the container ecosystem, which shut down its operations last October.
Containership, which launched as part of the TechCrunch 2015 Disrupt New York Startup Battlefield, started as a service that helped businesses move their containerized workloads between clouds. It then moved on to focus solely on Kubernetes.
“Containership enables customers to easily deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters and containerized applications in public cloud, private cloud, and on-premise environments,” writes Bobby Soni, the COO for digital infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara. “The software addresses critical cloud native application issues facing customers working with Kubernetes such as persistent storage support, centralized authentication, access control, audit logging, continuous deployment, workload portability, cost analysis, autoscaling, upgrades, and more.”
Hitachi Vantara says it will continue to work with the Kubernetes community. Containership was a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Hitachi never was, but after this acquisition, that may change.
