containers
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VMware acquires Heptio, the startup founded by 2 co-founders of Kubernetes
During its big customer event in Europe, VMware announced another acquisition to step up its game in helping enterprises build and run containerised, Kubernetes-based architectures: it has acquired Heptio, a startup out of Seattle that was co-founded by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, who were two of the three people who co-created Kubernetes back at Google in 2014 (it has since been open sourced).
Beda and McLuckie and their team will all be joining VMware in the transaction.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed — VMware said in a release that they are not material to the company — but as a point of reference, when Heptio last raised money — a $25 million Series B in 2017, with investors including Lightspeed, Accel and Madrona — it was valued at $117 million post-money, according to data from PitchBook.
Given the pedigree of Heptio’s founders, this is a signal of the big bet that VMware is taking on Kubernetes, and the belief that it will become an increasing cornerstone in how enterprises run their businesses. The larger company already works with 500,000+ customers globally, and 75,000 partners. It’s not clear how many customers Heptio worked with but they included large, tech-forward businesses like Yahoo Japan.
It’s also another endorsement of the ongoing rise of open source and its role in cloud architectures, a paradigm that got its biggest boost at the end of October with IBM’s acquisition of RedHat, one of the biggest tech acquisitions of all time at $34 billion.
Heptio provides professional services for enterprises that are adopting or already use Kubernetes, providing training, support and building open-source projects for managing specific aspects of Kubernetes and related container clusters, and this deal is about VMware expanding the business funnel and margins for Kubernetes within it its wider cloud, on-premise and hybrid storage and computing services with that expertise.
“Kubernetes is emerging as an open framework for multi-cloud infrastructure that enables enterprise organizations to run modern applications,” said Paul Fazzone, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Native Apps Business Unit, VMware, in a statement. “Heptio products and services will reinforce and extend VMware’s efforts with PKS to establish Kubernetes as the de facto standard for infrastructure across clouds upon closing. We are thrilled that the Heptio team led by Craig and Joe will be joining VMware to help us guide customers as they move to a multi-cloud world.”
VMware and its Pivotal business already offer Kubernetes-related services by way of PKS, which lets organizations run cloud-agnostic apps. Heptio will become a part of that wider portfolio.
“The team at Heptio has been focused on Kubernetes, creating products that make it easier to manage multiple clusters across multiple clouds,” said Craig McLuckie, CEO and co-founder of Heptio. “And now we will be tapping into VMware’s cloud native resources and proven ability to execute, amplifying our impact. VMware’s interest in Heptio is a recognition that there is so much innovation happening in open source. We are jointly committed to contribute even more to the community—resources, ideas and support.”
VMware has made some 33 acquisitions overall, according to Crunchbase, but this appears to have been the first specifically to boost its position in Kubernetes.
The deal is expected to close by fiscal Q4 2019, VMware said.
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New Relic acquires Belgium’s CoScale to expand its monitoring of Kubernetes containers and microservices
New Relic, a provider of analytics and monitoring around a company’s internal and external facing apps and services to help optimise their performance, is making an acquisition today as it continues to expand a newer area of its business, containers and microservices. The company has announced that it has purchased CoScale, a provider of monitoring for containers and microservices, with a specific focus on Kubernetes.
Terms of the deal — which will include the team and technology — are not being disclosed, as it will not have a material impact on New Relic’s earnings. The larger company is traded on the NYSE (ticker: NEWR) and has been a strong upswing in the last two years, and its current market cap its around $4.6 billion.
Originally founded in Belgium, CoScale had raised $6.4 million and was last valued at $7.9 million, according to PitchBook. Investors included Microsoft (via its ScaleUp accelerator), PMV and the Qbic Fund, two Belgian investors.
“We are thrilled to bring CoScale’s knowledge and deeply technical team into the New Relic fold,” noted Ramon Guiu, senior director of product management at New Relic. “The CoScale team members joining New Relic will focus on incorporating CoScale’s capabilities and experience into continuing innovations for the New Relic platform.”
The deal underscores how New Relic has had to shift in the last couple of years: when the company was founded years ago, application monitoring was a relatively easy task, with the web and a specified number of services the limit of what needed attention. But services, apps and functions have become increasingly complex and now tap data stored across a range of locations and devices, and processing everything generates a lot of computing demand.
New Relic first added container and microservices monitoring to its stack in 2016. That’s a somewhat late arrival to the area, New Relic CEO Lew Cirne believes that it’s just at the right time, dovetailing New Relic’s changes with wider shifts in the market.
‘We think those changes have actually been an opportunity for us to further differentiate and further strengthen our thesis that the New Relic way is really the most logical way to address this,” he told my colleague Ron Miller last month. As Ron wrote, Cirne’s take is that New Relic has always been centered on the code, as opposed to the infrastructure where it’s delivered, and that has helped it make adjustments as the delivery mechanisms have changed.
New Relic already provides monitoring for Kubernetes, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and RedHat Openshift, and the idea is that CoScale will help it ramp up across that range, while also adding Docker and OpenShift to the mix, as well as offering new services down the line to serve the DevOps community.
“The visions of New Relic and CoScale are remarkably well aligned, so our team is excited that we get to join New Relic and continue on our journey of helping companies innovate faster by providing them visibility into the performance of their modern architectures,” said CoScale CEO Stijn Polfliet, in a statement. “[Co-founder] Fred [Ryckbosch] and I feel like this is such an exciting space and time to be in this market, and we’re thrilled to be teaming up with the amazing team at New Relic, the leader in monitoring modern applications and infrastructure.”
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Twistlock snares $33 million Series C investment to secure cloud native environments
As the world shifts to a cloud native approach, the way you secure applications as they get deployed is changing too. Twistlock, a company built from the ground up to secure cloud native environments, announced a $33 million Series C round today led by Iconiq Capital.
Previous investors YL Ventures, TenEleven, Rally Ventures, Polaris Partners and Dell Technologies Capital also participated in the round. The company reports it has received a total of $63 million in venture investment to date.
Twistlock is solving a hard problem around securing containers and serverless, which are by their nature ephemeral. They can live for fractions of seconds making it hard track problems when they happen. According to company CEO and co-founder Ben Bernstein, his company came out of the gate building a security product designed to protect a cloud-native environment with the understanding that while containers and serverless computing may be ephemeral, they are still exploitable.
“It’s not about how long they live, but about the fact that the way they live is more predictable than a traditional computer, which could be running for a very long time and might have humans actually using it,” Bernstein said.
Screenshot: Twistlock
As companies move to a cloud native environment using Dockerized containers and managing them with Kubernetes and other tools, they create a highly automated system to deal with the deployment volume. While automation simplifies deployment, it can also leave companies vulnerable to host of issues. For example, if a malicious actor were to get control of the process via a code injection attack, they could cause a lot of problems without anyone knowing about it.
Twistlock is built to help prevent that, while also helping customers recognize when an exploit happens and performing forensic analysis to figure out how it happened.
It’s not a traditional Software as a Service as we’ve come to think of it. Instead, it is a service that gets installed on whatever public or private cloud that the customer is using. So far, they count just over 200 customers including Walgreens and Aetna and a slew of other companies you would definitely recognize, but they couldn’t name publicly.
The company, which was founded in 2015, is based in Portland, Oregon with their R&D arm in Israel. They currently have 80 employees. Bernstein said from a competitive standpoint, the traditional security vendors are having trouble reacting to cloud native, and while he sees some startups working at it, he believes his company has the most mature offering, at least for now.
“We don’t have a lot of competition right now, but as we start progressing we will see more,” he said. He plans to use the money they receive today to help expand their marketing and sales arm to continue growing their customer base, but also engineering to stay ahead of that competition as the cloud-native security market continues to develop.
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Docker aims to federate container management across clouds
When Docker burst on the scene in 2013, it brought the idea of containers to a broad audience. Since then Kubernetes has emerged as a way to orchestrate the delivery of those containerized apps, but Docker saw a gap that wasn’t being addressed beyond pure container deployment that they are trying to address with the next release of Docker Enterprise Edition. Docker made the announcement today at DockerCon in San Francisco.
Scott Johnston, chief product officer at Docker says that Docker Enterprise Edition’s new federated application management feature helps operations manage multiple clusters, whether those clusters are on premise, in the cloud or across different public cloud providers. This allows federated management of application wherever they live and supports managed Kubernetes tools from the big three public cloud providers including Azure AKS, AWS EKS and Google GKE.
Johnston says that deploying the containers is just the first part of the problem. There is a whole set of issues to deal with outside of Kubernetes (and other orchestration tools) once your application begins being deployed. “So, you know, you get portability of containers with the Docker format and the Kubernetes or Compose description files, but once you land on an environment, that environment has deployment scripts, security models, user management and [so forth]. So while the app is portable, the management of these applications is not,” he explained.
He says that can lead to a set of separate deployment tools creating a new level of complexity that using containers was supposed to eliminate. This is especially true when deploying across multiple clouds (and on prem sometimes too). If you need load balancing, security, testing and so forth — the kinds of tasks the operations team has to undertake — and you want to apply these in a consistent way regardless of the environment, Johnston says that Docker EE should help by creating a single place to manage across environments and achieve that cloud native goal of managing all your applications and data and infrastructure in a unified way.
In addition to the federated management component, Docker also announced Windows Server containers on Kubernetes for Docker Enterprise Edition. It had previously announced support for Linux containers last year.
Finally, the company is introducing a template-based approach to Docker deployment to enable people in the organization with a bit less technical sophistication to deploy from a guided graphical process instead of a command line interface.
The federated application management is available in Beta starting the second half of this year, support for Windows Server Containers will be included in the next release of Docker Enterprise Edition later this year and Templates will be available in Docker Desktop in Beta later this year.
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Sumo Logic brings data analysis to containers
Sumo Logic has long held the goal to help customers understand their data wherever it lives. As we move into the era of containers, that goal becomes more challenging because containers by their nature are ephemeral. The company announced a product enhancement today designed to instrument containerized applications in spite of that.
They are debuting these new features at DockerCon, Docker’s customer conference taking place this week in San Francisco.
Sumo’s CEO Ramin Sayer says containers have begun to take hold over the last 12-18 months with Docker and Kubernetes emerging as tools of choice. Given their popularity, Sumo wants to be able to work with them. “[Docker and Kubernetes] are by far the most standard things that have developed in any new shop, or any existing shop that wants to build a brand new modern app or wants to lift and shift an app from on prem [to the cloud], or have the ability to migrate workloads from Vendor A platform to Vendor B,” he said.
He’s not wrong of course. Containers and Kubernetes have been taking off in a big way over the last 18 months and developers and operations alike have struggled to instrument these apps to understand how they behave.
“But as that standardization of adoption of that technology has come about, it makes it easier for us to understand how to instrument, collect, analyze, and more importantly, start to provide industry benchmarks,” Sayer explained.
They do this by avoiding the use of agents. Regardless of how you run your application, whether in a VM or a container, Sumo is able to capture the data and give you feedback you might otherwise have trouble retrieving.
Screen shot: Sumo Logic (cropped)
The company has built in native support for Kubernetes and Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS). It also supports the open source tool Prometheus favored by Kubernetes users to extract metrics and metadata. The goal of the Sumo tool is to help customers fix issues faster and reduce downtime.
As they work with this technology, they can begin to understand norms and pass that information onto customers. “We can guide them and give them best practices and tips, not just on what they’ve done, but how they compare to other users on Sumo,” he said.
Sumo Logic was founded in 2010 and has raised $230 million, according to data on Crunchbase. Its most recent round was a $70 million Series F led by Sapphire Ventures last June.
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Kubernetes stands at an important inflection point
Last week at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen, we saw an open source community coming together, full of vim and vigor and radiating positive energy as it recognized its growing clout in the enterprise world. Kubernetes, which came out of Google just a few years ago, has gained acceptance and popularity astonishingly rapidly — and that has raised both a sense of possibility and a boat load of questions.
At this year’s European version of the conference, the community seemed to be coming to grips with that rapid growth as large corporate organizations like Red Hat, IBM, Google, AWS and VMware all came together with developers and startups trying to figure out exactly what they had here with this new thing they found.
The project has been gaining acceptance as the defacto container orchestration tool, and as that happened, it was no longer about simply getting a project off the ground and proving that it could work in production. It now required a greater level of tooling and maturity that previously wasn’t necessary because it was simply too soon.
As this has happened, the various members who make up this growing group of users, need to figure out, mostly on the fly, how to make it all work when it is no longer just a couple of developers and a laptop. There are now big boy and big girl implementations and they require a new level of sophistication to make them work.
Against this backdrop, we saw a project that appeared to be at an inflection point. Much like a startup that realizes it actually achieved the product-market fit it had hypothesized, the Kubernetes community has to figure out how to take this to the next level — and that reality presents some serious challenges and enormous opportunities.
A community in transition
The Kubernetes project falls under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (or CNCF for short). Consider that at the opening keynote, CNCF director Dan Kohn was brimming with enthusiasm, proudly rattling off numbers to a packed audience, showing the enormous growth of the project.
Photo: Ron Miller
If you wanted proof of Kubernetes’ (and by extension cloud native computing’s) rapid ascension, consider that the attendance at KubeCon in Copenhagen last week numbered 4300 registered participants, triple the attendance in Berlin just last year.
The hotel and conference center were buzzing with conversation. Every corner and hallway, every bar stool in the hotel’s open lobby bar, at breakfast in the large breakfast room, by the many coffee machines scattered throughout the venue, and even throughout the city, people chatted, debated and discussed Kubernetes and the energy was palpable.
David Aronchick, who now runs the open source Kubeflow Kubernetes machine learning project at Google, was running Kubernetes in the early days (way back in 2015) and he was certainly surprised to see how big it has become in such a short time.
“I couldn’t have predicted it would be like this. I joined in January, 2015 and took on project management for Google Kubernetes. I was stunned at the pent up demand for this kind of thing,” he said.
Growing up
Yet there was great demand, and with each leap forward and each new level of maturity came a new set of problems to solve, which in turn has created opportunities for new services and startups to fill in the many gaps. As Aparna Sinha, who is the Kubernetes group product manager at Google, said in her conference keynote, enterprise companies want some level of certainty that earlier adopters were willing to forego to take a plunge into the new and exciting world of containers.
Photo: Cloud Native Computing Foundation
As she pointed out, for others to be pulled along and for this to truly reach another level of adoption, it’s going to require some enterprise-level features and that includes security, a higher level of application tooling and a better overall application development experience. All these types of features are coming, whether from Google or from the myriad of service providers who have popped up around the project to make it easier to build, deliver and manage Kubernetes applications.
Sinha says that one of the reasons the project has been able to take off as quickly as it has, is that its roots lie in a container orchestration tool called Borg, which the company has been using internally for years. While that evolved into what we know today as Kubernetes, it certainly required some significant repackaging to work outside of Google. Yet that early refinement at Google gave it an enormous head start over an average open source project — which could account for its meteoric rise.
“When you take something so well established and proven in a global environment like Google and put it out there, it’s not just like any open source project invented from scratch when there isn’t much known and things are being developed in real time,” she said.
For every action
One thing everyone seemed to recognize at KubeCon was that in spite of the head start and early successes, there remains much work to be done, many issues to resolve. The companies using it today mostly still fall under the early adopter moniker. This remains true even though there are some full blown enterprise implementations like CERN, the European physics organization, which has spun up 210 Kubernetes clusters or JD.com, the Chinese Internet shopping giant, which has 20K servers running Kubernetes with the largest cluster consisting of over 5000 servers. Still, it’s fair to say that most companies aren’t that far along yet.
Photo: Ron Miller
But the strength of an enthusiastic open source community like Kubernetes and cloud native computing in general, means that there are companies, some new and some established, trying to solve these problems, and the multitude of new ones that seem to pop up with each new milestone and each solved issue.
As Abby Kearns, who runs another open source project, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, put it in her keynote, part of the beauty of open source is all those eyeballs on it to solve the scads of problems that are inevitably going to pop up as projects expand beyond their initial scope.
“Open source gives us the opportunity to do things we could never do on our own. Diversity of thought and participation is what makes open source so powerful and so innovative,” she said.
It’s worth noting that several speakers pointed out that diversity of thought also required actual diversity of membership to truly expand ideas to other ways of thinking and other life experiences. That too remains a challenge, as it does in technology and society at large.
In spite of this, Kubernetes has grown and developed rapidly, while benefiting from a community which so enthusiastically supports it. The challenge ahead is to take that early enthusiasm and translate it into more actual business use cases. That is the inflection point where the project finds itself, and the question is will it be able to take that next step toward broader adoption or reach a peak and fall back.
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RedHat’s CoreOS launches a new toolkit for managing Kubernetes applications
CoreOS, the Linux distribution and container management startup Red Hat acquired for $250 million earlier this year, today announced the Operator Framework, a new open source toolkit for managing Kubernetes clusters.
CoreOS first talked about operators in 2016. The general idea here is to encode the best practices for deploying and managing container-based applications as code. “The way we like to think of this is that the operators are basically a picture of the best employee you have,” Red Hat OpenShift product manager Rob Szumski told me. Ideally, the Operator Framework frees up the operations team from doing all the grunt work of managing applications and allows them to focus on higher-level tasks. And at the same time, it also removes the error-prone humans from the process since the operator will always follow the company rulebook.
“To make the most of Kubernetes, you need a set of cohesive APIs to extend in order to service and manage your applications that run on Kubernetes,” CoreOS CTO Brandon Philips explains in today’s announcement. “We consider Operators to be the runtime that manages this type of application on Kubernetes.”
As Szumski told me, the CoreOS team developed many of these best practices in building and managing its own Tectonic container platform (and from the community that uses it). Once written, the operators watch over the Kubernetes cluster and can handle upgrades, for example, and when things go awry, the can react to failures within milliseconds.
The overall Operator Framework consists of three pieces: an SDK for building, testing and packaging the actual operator, the Operator Lifecycle Manager for deploying the operator to a Kubernetes cluster and managing them, and the Operator Metering tool for metering Kubernetes users for enterprises that need to do chargebacks or that want to charge their customers based on usage.
The metering tool doesn’t quite seem to fit into the overall goal here, but as Szumski told me, it’s something a lot of businesses have been looking for and CoreOS actually argues that this is a first for Kubernetes.
Today’s CoreOS/Red Hat announcement only marks the start of a week that’ll likely see numerous other Kubernetes-related announcements. That’s because the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is its KubeCon developer conference in the next few days and virtually every company in the container ecosystem will attend the event and have some kind of announcements.
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Heptio launches an open-source load balancer for Kubernetes and OpenStack
Heptio is one of the more interesting companies in the container ecosystem. In part, that’s due to the simple fact that it was founded by Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, two of the three engineers behind the original Kubernetes project, but also because of the technology it’s developing and the large amount of funding it has raised to date.
As the company announced today, it saw its revenue grow 140 percent from the last quarter of 2017 to the first quarter of 2018. In addition, Heptio says its headcount quadrupled since the beginning of 2017. Without any actual numbers, that kind of data doesn’t mean all that much. It’s easy to achieve high-growth numbers if you’re starting out from zero, after all. But it looks like things are going well at the company and that the team is finding its place in the fast-growing Kubernetes ecosystem.
In addition to announcing these numbers, the team also today launched a new open-source project that will join the company’s existing stable of tools, like the cluster-recovery tool Ark and the Kubernetes cluster-monitoring tool Sonobuoy.
This new tool, Heptio Gimbal, has a very specific use case that is probably only of interest to a relatively small number of users — but for them, it’ll be a lifeline. Gimbal, which Heptio developed together with Yahoo Japan subsidiary Actapio, helps enterprises route traffic into both Kubernetes clusters and OpenStack deployments. Many enterprises now run these technologies in parallel, and while some are now moving beyond OpenStack and toward a more Kubernetes -centric architecture, they aren’t likely to do away with their OpenStack investments anytime soon.
“We approached Heptio to help us modernize our infrastructure with Kubernetes without ripping out legacy investments in OpenStack and other back-end systems,” said Norifumi Matsuya, CEO and president at Actapio. “Application delivery at scale is key to our business. We needed faster service discovery and canary deployment capability that provides instant rollback and performance measurement. Gimbal enables our developers to address these challenges, which at the macro-level helps them increase their productivity and optimize system performance.”
Gimbal uses many of Heptio’s existing open-source tools, as well as the Envoy proxy, which is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s stable of cloud-native projects. For now, Gimbal only supports one specific OpenStack release (the “Mitaka” release from 2016), but the team is looking at adding support for VMware and EC2 in the future.
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Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry grow closer
Containers are eating the software world — and Kubernetes is the king of containers. So if you are working on any major software project, especially in the enterprise, you will run into it sooner or later. Cloud Foundry, which hosted its semi-annual developer conference in Boston this week, is an interesting example for this.
Outside of the world of enterprise developers, Cloud Foundry remains a bit of an unknown entity, despite having users in at least half of the Fortune 500 companies (though in the startup world, it has almost no traction). If you are unfamiliar with Cloud Foundry, you can think of it as somewhat similar to Heroku, but as an open-source project with a large commercial ecosystem and the ability to run it at scale on any cloud or on-premises installation. Developers write their code (following the twelve-factor methodology), define what it needs to run and Cloud Foundry handles all of the underlying infrastructure and — if necessary — scaling. Ideally, that frees up the developer from having to think about where their applications will run and lets them work more efficiently.
To enable all of this, the Cloud Foundry Foundation made a very early bet on containers, even before Docker was a thing. Since Kubernetes wasn’t around at the time, the various companies involved in Cloud Foundry came together to build their own container orchestration system, which still underpins much of the service today. As it took off, though, the pressure to bring support for Kubernetes grew inside of the Cloud Foundry ecosystem. Last year, the Foundation announced its first major move in this direction by launching its Kubernetes-based Container Runtime for managing containers, which sits next to the existing Application Runtime. With this, developers can use Cloud Foundry to run and manage their new (and existing) monolithic apps and run them in parallel with the new services they develop.
But remember how Cloud Foundry also still uses its own container service for the Application Runtime? There is really no reason to do that now that Kubernetes (and the various other projects in its ecosystem) have become the default of handling containers. It’s maybe no surprise then that there is now a Cloud Foundry project that aims to rip out the old container management systems and replace them with Kubernetes. The container management piece isn’t what differentiates Cloud Foundry, after all. Instead, it’s the developer experience — and at the end of the day, the whole point of Cloud Foundry is that developers shouldn’t have to care about the internal plumbing of the infrastructure.
There is another aspect to how the Cloud Foundry ecosystem is embracing Kubernetes, too. Since Cloud Foundry is also just software, there’s nothing stopping you from running it on top of Kubernetes, too. And with that, it’s no surprise that some of the largest Cloud Foundry vendors, including SUSE and IBM, are doing exactly that.
The SUSE Cloud Application Platform, which is a certified Cloud Foundry distribution, can run on any public cloud Kubernetes infrastructure, including the Microsoft Azure Container service. As the SUSE team told me, that means it’s not just easier to deploy, but also far less resource-intensive to run.
Similarly, IBM is now offering Cloud Foundry on top of Kubernetes for its customers, though it’s only calling this an experimental product for now. IBM’s GM of Cloud Developer Services Don Boulia stressed that IBM’s customers were mostly looking for ways to run their workloads in an isolated environment that isn’t shared with other IBM customers.
Boulia also stressed that for most customers, it’s not about Kubernetes versus Cloud Foundry. For most of his customers, using Kubernetes by itself is very much about moving their existing applications to the cloud. And for new applications, those customers are then opting to run Cloud Foundry.
That’s something the SUSE team also stressed. One pattern SUSE has seen is that potential customers come to it with the idea of setting up a container environment and then, over the course of the conversation, decide to implement Cloud Foundry as well.
Indeed, the message of this week’s event was very much that Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry are complementary technologies. That’s something Chen Goldberg, Google’s Director of Engineering for Container Engine and Kubernetes, also stressed during a panel discussion at the event.
Both the Cloud Foundry Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the home of Kubernetes, are under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation. They take somewhat different approaches to their communities, with Cloud Foundry stressing enterprise users far more than the CNCF. There are probably some politics at play here, but for the most part, the two organizations seem friendly enough — and they do share a number of members. “We are part of CNCF and part of Cloud Foundry foundation,” Pivotal CEO Rob Mee told our own Ron Miller. “Those communities are increasingly sharing tech back and forth and evolving together. Not entirely independent and not competitive either. Lot of complexity and subtlety. CNCF and Cloud Foundry are part of a larger ecosystem with complimentary and converging tech.”
We’ll likely see more of this technology sharing — and maybe collaboration — between the CNCF and Cloud Foundry going forward. The CNCF is, after all, the home of a number of very interesting projects for building cloud-native applications that do have their fair share of use cases in Cloud Foundry, too.
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GoDaddy to move most of its infrastructure to AWS, not including domain management for its 75M domains
It really is Go Time for GoDaddy . Amazon’s cloud services provider AWS and GoDaddy, the domain registration and management giant, may have competed in the past when it comes to working with small businesses to provide them with web services, but today the two took a step closer together. AWS said that GoDaddy is now migrating “the majority” of its infrastructure to AWS in a multi-year deal that will also see AWS becoming a partner in selling on some products of GoDaddy’s — namely Managed WordPress and GoCentral for managing domains and building and running websites.
The deal — financial terms of which are not being disclosed — is wide-ranging, but it will not include taking on domain management for GoDaddy’s 75 million domains currently under management, a spokesperson for the company confirmed to me.
“GoDaddy is not migrating the domains it manages to AWS,” said Dan Race, GoDaddy’s VP of communications. “GoDaddy will continue to manage all customer domains. Domain management is obviously a core business for GoDaddy.”
The move underscores Amazon’s continuing expansion as a powerhouse in cloud hosting and related services, providing a one-stop shop for customers who come for one product and stay for everything else (not unlike its retail strategy in that regard). Also, it is a reminder of how the economies of scale in the cloud business make it financially challenging to compete if you are not already one of the big players, or lack deep pockets to sustain your business as you look to grow. GoDaddy has been a direct victim of those economics: just last summer, GoDaddy killed off Cloud Servers, its AWS-style business for building, testing and scaling cloud services on GoDaddy infrastructure. It also already was hosting some services on AWS prior to this: its enterprise-grade Managed WordPress service was already being hosted there, for example.
The AWS deal also highlights how GoDaddy is trimming operational costs to improve its overall balance sheet under Scott Wagner, the COO who took over as CEO from Blake Irving at the beginning of this year.
“As a technology provider with more than 17 million customers, it was very important for GoDaddy to select a cloud provider with deep experience in delivering a highly reliable global infrastructure, as well as an unmatched track record of technology innovation, to support our rapidly expanding business,” said Charles Beadnall, CTO at GoDaddy, in a statement.
“AWS provides a superior global footprint and set of cloud capabilities which is why we selected them to meet our needs today and into the future. By operating on AWS, we’ll be able to innovate at the speed and scale we need to deliver powerful new tools that will help our customers run their own ventures and be successful online,” he continued.
AWS said that GoDaddy will be using AWS’s Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes and Elastic Compute Cloud P3 instances, as well as machine learning, analytics, and other database-related and container technology. Race told TechCrunch that the infrastructure components that the company is migrating to AWS currently run at GoDaddy but will be gradually moved away as part of its multi-year migration.
“As a large, high-growth business, GoDaddy will be able to leverage AWS to innovate for its customers around the world,” said Mike Clayville, VP, worldwide commercial sales at AWS, in a statement. “Our industry-leading services will enable GoDaddy to leverage emerging technologies like machine learning, quickly test ideas, and deliver new tools and solutions to their customers with greater frequency. We look forward to collaborating with GoDaddy as they build anew in the cloud and innovate new solutions to help people turn their ideas into reality online.”
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