Greetings from Datawise.io (now Diamanti)!
We’ve been working in stealth-mode the last couple months, but wanted to take the opportunity to share some of what we’ve been working on with the community for early feedback.
What is Project 6?
Project 6 is software for deploying and managing Docker containers across a cluster of hosts, focused on simplifying on-premises environments. Our approach for simplifying infrastructure to run containers differs from other tools in the way it approaches private vs. public cloud environments, networking, and storage configurations:
Optimized for Bare-metal, On-premises Environments
Amazon’s Elastic Container Service and Google’s Container Engine are good services that provide clustered container infrastructure, but unfortunately most of the automation they provide is not available outside their cloud offerings for on-premises use cases.
- Project 6 takes a set of Linux machines, ideally without hypervisors for optimal performance, and quickly organizes them into a cluster ready to run containers.
- Cluster-wide Control over Network Configurations for Simpler Manageability Docker provides a variety of network options, and Kubernetes adds additional concepts like services, but their default port-mapping approaches incur significant performance overheads. Assigning IP addresses to individual containers is possible, but requires assigning subnets to every host.Project 6 promotes network subnets into cluster-wide managed entities and containers into first class endpoints. Sharing subnets across a cluster, and assigning unique IP addresses to containers from pre-allocated ra nges improves performance over port-mapping, simplifies management, and minimizes unused ranges.
- Direct Attached, Local Disks for Cheap and Fast Storage Docker and Kubernetes provide the flexibility to integrate with different types of storage, but assume that data management tasks will be performed elsewhere.
Project 6 introduces storage and data management alongside container lifecycle management, and leverages direct attached disks for low cost and great performance.
