Is it perfect to use Docker as a PAAs alternative? _docker

With the popularization of digital technology, more and more enterprises are confronted with massive data. Although companies want to use large data nuggets, however, the lack of digital capabilities also makes it very easy to drown in this vast expanse of data in the ocean. The internet has made it possible to flow and share data, and the development of cloud computing technology has made data analysis more comprehensive.

As one of the three service forms of cloud computing, PAAs seems to have been tepid and stagnant. The advent of Docker seems to bring a new choice, and is more flexible, convenient and easy to use for developers. Since the user can run directly on the Docker, does the PAAs have an application scenario? In the face of Enterprise's complex application environment, is it perfect to use Docker as a PAAs alternative?

Mr. Liuweiguang, general manager of pivotal Greater China, said in an interview with 51CTO reporters: "Therelationship between Docker and PAAs should be integration, not competition ." ”

Pivotal, a joint venture between EMC and VMware, has been operating independently since April 2013. 2015 was a milestone year for Pivotal Global and China, and its PCF (Pivotal Cloudfoundry), based on the open source PAAs platform, grew more than 300% per cent in the Chinese market. 2016 pivotal continue to exert force in China, will be "rooted in the Chinese market, exerting its force on high-end enterprises" as a strategic theme of development.

The interview with Liuweiguang gave reporters an idea of the significance of the pivotal localization strategy in the context of the global scramble for digital transformation, and how to look at Docker and PAAs in the cloud process of Chinese companies.

The transformation of digitalization in the global scope

From Germany's "Industrial 4.0", the United States "industrial Internet" to "China manufacturing 2025", digital transformation led the enterprise IT revolution is opening up around the world. Data is the core of digital transformation. Although the concept of large data in China has been hyped for many years, the actual application in the traditional industry still has a certain gap with the European and American countries. Large data projects in many traditional industries, such as agriculture and manufacturing, still remain in the early stages, and even in our powerful financial and telecommunications industries, we can still see many large data-platform projects still struggling to escape the shadow of the existing data warehouses and data marts.

In the final analysis, this is the difference between national productivity. The United States, health, health, manufacturing, agriculture, retailing, ocean exploration and many other industries have combined large data with productivity. Through the use of sensor technology and machine learning technology to achieve a variety of data source collection, management, analysis and decision support to generate new business value, greatly promote the development of productivity.

China's big data projects are no less than those in Europe and the United States, but most of us are still around the traditional project updates, upgrades. Although China is also a manufacturing powerhouse, in these industries, large data and cloud computing projects in the start-up, implementation cycle, compared to our financial, telecommunications, the Internet is still slower. But in time, I believe that China's active exploration and practice in the fields of telecommunications, finance, Internet, electricity and logistics will surely lead to the trend of the whole industrial chain towards digital transformation.

PAAs starts to become an enterprise it just needs

Enterprise's cloud path often passes through one of two kinds of paths-"platform first" or "Apply first".

When an enterprise it is strong enough to see it as its vitality, IT departments tend to consider business innovation before the business unit and play a leading role in enterprise development. By absorbing more ideas from emerging technologies, embracing good open source technology, and planning ways to build cloud computing, large data platforms, and other technologies to meet the potential burst growth needs of the future. This is the "platform first" path.

The first advantage of the platform is that after building a unified IaaS and PAAs platform, all the hardware resources and tools software resources of the enterprise are integrated together, and the underlying data is unified and integrated. This not only simplifies the maintenance complexity, shortens the development cost cycle of the program, realizes the unification of many kinds of application development and deployment platforms, but also improves the response speed of the internal personnel, enhances the production efficiency, and reduces the maintenance cost cloud economic effect is becoming more and more obvious.

However, most of the enterprises in China are still taking the first route of application. The rise of mobile Internet makes enterprise application development must be busy to catch up with the pace of market trends, which resulted in the rapid increase in software development costs and hardware resource consumption at the same time, today almost all of the enterprise application system construction steps are speeding up, the traditional application of the upgrading is still in progress, new mobile applications The challenges posed by different development patterns are increasingly evident in the complexity of application management and maintenance. That's when cloud computing is at a stage where it has to drive change. The benefit of the PAAs level is that the most effective way to achieve devops is to shorten the cycle of the entire development design test deployment, effectively reducing the difficulty of managing maintenance, and improving the system's market-oriented product update speed.

In Liuweiguang's view, companies that really have PAAs requirements tend to have several characteristics

Application is complex enough. Including legacy applications, and new applications to be developed.

Multiple data sources generated by multiple applications

A wide range of open source large data technology systems that will be deployed

In the enterprise's traditional system construction situation analysis, from the application to the webserver, the runtime to the database last to the host network and storage, usually presents the "chimney-style" form, many kinds of chimney coexist almost is so enterprise today face common problem, and it is not only through virtualization can solve. IaaS's work is to be in the development of the enterprise concern a series of the underlying resources isolated, abstract management, hardware resources to achieve horizontal and unified scheduling, and no longer need a particular environment. PAAs is different from the virtualization technology to the management and integration of hardware resources, it realizes the software resources scheduling, scaling and management, will involve a lot of middleware, container, database, monitoring management, task scheduling and so on. PAAs through the provision of unified management dashboard, allows users to visually see the hundreds of applications above the running state, resource usage, flexible deployment of resources, the system automatically realize scheduling resources, management resources, release applications, and new applications are easy to publish, manage, Reduce the entire usage cycle. This is a fundamental change to the past IT system development operation. "PAAs is more like the IT operating environment of Lei Feng, presented to the Kai, trouble themselves, convenient for others." "Liuweiguang so described.

The choice between Docker and PAAs

Docker, by packaging applications into Docker files or mirrors, is released throughout the container, enabling rapid migration of the application environment, shielding many developers from the complexity of management. But Liuweiguang also said that Docker is just a container. Once an enterprise needs PAAs, the goal must be to address the need for large-scale and complex applications. At present, Docker containers, although many developers, but in the enterprise application of the most important to the stability is still not reassuring. It's very complicated to manage to build hundreds of Docker. Docker layout and management has been missing, so on top of it has developed a number of container ecological participants, such as Mesos, Kubernetes, Marathon, Swarm and so on, are helping Docker growth. However, the ecological circle in the development process can not avoid competition between each other. The enterprise pursues is the time and the potency, regarding how chooses, the combination use these Docker arrangement and the dispatch tool, not only is very difficult for the enterprise, also greatly increases the management and the maintenance cost.

The principle of the PaaS platform is "App-centric", which is centered on application rather than container. Enterprise PAAs Platform Container Services If you manage hundreds of applications, you need to support the application level of continuous release, continuous integration, security services, routing management, Gray management, configuration management and so on functions, the current Docker ecosystem still does not have any one function to meet these needs, Choose between five and eight tools to hand-create the combination of these features. At the same time supporting these functions of the platform, their own upgrades, expansion, disaster recovery backup mechanism will become another problem of enterprises. Of course, the Docker is progressing very quickly and is constantly solving various problems. Docker and pivotal are OCI container standard members, the future of the container technology will certainly move towards a unified standard Runc, just as the same as the standard of Java. Cloud Foundry already supports the use of Docker mirroring. Cloud Foundry, as the mainstream open source PAAs, has been validated in key production applications in many large enterprises.

PCF is a commercial version of the pivotal based on the open source PAAs platform Cloud Foundry, dedicated to creating out-of-the-box Enterprise PAAs services for the enterprise by defining the PAAs functionality specification. Talking about how to view the relationship between Docker and cloud Foundry, Liuweiguang that: "The Docker and cloud relationship should be inclusive, not competition." The Cloud Foundry Foundation has dozens of members, Docker is also one of the members, and is also constantly concerned about the development of Cloud Foundry's biosphere. Pivotal is also working with IBM, Google, Amazon and other companies to establish OCI (Open Container Initiative), to develop the entire Docker container future standards.

PCF enables enterprises to meet the needs of using Docker and to achieve the features of Easy-to-use enterprise-class security management, application management, and data services provided by pivotal Cloudfoundry by building a container-oriented, data-focused, enterprise-class PAAs platform. PCF only serves as a layer in the platform for the container, in this container layer there is a line, called "Value Chain", under it is the management of containers, layout, mirroring, documents, container warehouses, etc. the above is enterprise-class applications, such as Jenkins, such as continuous integration, continuous release services, DevOps to provide direct support.

According to Liuweiguang revealed that the entire pivotal Cloud foundry future research and development direction will be to Docker eco-circle tools tilt. Support for Kubernetes integration has begun in the Pcf1.7beta version.

In addition, PCF has the natural advantage of the spring framework, and programmers can use spring cloud to develop cloud native programs and publish them directly to the platform; In addition to supporting application operations, PCF has built-in MySQL, RABBITMQ, Redis, GemFire, A large number of data services, such as Cassandra and MongoDB, provide database service support for product-level applications, while also supporting one-click Publishing, continuous integration and continuous delivery, and APM, Elk engines, and so on, to truly focus on the lifecycle management of enterprise applications.

"As the new pivotal Cloud foundry leader Onsi said, ' The Pacific Ocean is large enough to allow multiple winners, Instead of everyone in this market at the beginning of the table overturned ', if the Docker and Cloudfoudnry to achieve a perfect fusion, will produce a powerful and incomparable compatibility technology platform, so that users do not have his choice, thereby eminence ", Liuweiguang said.

Localization strategy for Pivotal

2016 pivotal will be the strategic theme of "rooted in the Chinese market, with the force of high-end enterprises." Liuweiguang to reporters the strategic significance of the theme: "Pivotal want to do a deep buried in the Chinese market, through the deep cooperation with strong local partners, according to the Chinese market conditions and current development form, Combine pivotal cloud computing and large data products with the enterprise's own application solutions to provide more complete services for those enterprises that are truly in need. ”

After a long period of exploration and investigation of China's market, pivotal still focus on the large state-owned enterprises, finance, telecommunications and other cloud computing, large data development relatively mature high-end enterprise market, and has begun for ping an technology, Merchants Bank, TSMC, Citic Securities, the capital online, the National Center for Supercomputing, Beijing TV station more than dozens of large enterprise customers to provide PAAs solutions, we are working with a number of larger enterprises in the field of cooperation and exploration, in the second half of 2016 I believe there will be more exciting news came.

Liuweiguang is optimistic about the future of cloud computing and large data in China's domestic market, and is confident of Pivotal's market share:

"Many high-end Chinese companies have begun to use PAAs as the core of cloud computing after being hit by internet companies," he said. Cloud computing and big data are a pair of born brothers, and in large enterprises, cloud computing projects often need to be combined with big data. Pivotal is a unique company offering PAAs and comprehensive data solutions, backed by the strong support of brother VMware and EMC in the technology system, which allows us to help our customers move to big data on the cloud. In the future, we will help more high-end enterprise customers gradually realize digital transformation. ”

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