A revolutionary change to the datacenter is occurring as DevOps, the merging of continuous development with operations, becomes more mainstream. According to Gartner, by 2016, DevOps will become a mainstream strategy in 25 percent of global 2000 Organizations. And recently the merchandising giant Target has announced that they are moving to the DevOps model and have created an incubator project to teach internal engineering and datacenter staff the new systems of management. Most notable was the way in which DevOps technology was introduced to Target in the first place: against the I.T. departments wishes. According to the Wall St. Journal blog article linked above, the grass roots effort requested popular DevOps tools like GitHub, Chef, and Jenkins, to be supported by the I.T. department, and were denied. They obtained the tools anyway, knowing they would need them. These tools have now become integral to their DevOps implementation. This grass roots migration to this new form of application delivery and support is gaining traction, and datacenter admins are on notice.

At the core of the DevOps methodology is the enabling technology of Linux Containers, which enable many of the best features of virtual machines while reducing the overhead needed to run individual apps. Container runtimes like Docker and Rocket allow developers and operations engineers to deploy and manage application delivery and availability on a per container basis. More recently Google Kubernetes has made orchestration of containers via Docker or Rocket practical due to the ease of creating, deploying, and managing containers. Developers use Docker to isolate application components into individual containers and Kubernetes pods to logically group containers, simplifying app deployment. This allows developers to focus on the application to be developed, and less on the run time concerns of where and how the application components are deployed. Since containers don’t carry an entire OS, they deploy much more quickly than virtual machines.

Kubernetes is a leading orchestration and management technology for containers. Datawise.io (now Diamanti) has added significant contributions to the Kubernetes project to help make it more effective in managing network and storage resources. In short, helping to make DevOps painless. We are committed to making DevOps more robust, stable, and reliable. In my next blog, I’ll will show how the innovations Datawise.io (now Diamanti) has contributed to Kubernetes will be applied to the DevOps process, to help it mature into a mainstream platform for datacenter management