EasyStack launches ESContainer, ready with OpenStack+K8S platform for the enterprise

BEIJING, May 10, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- EasyStack, the leading OpenStack platform solution and service provider, recently officially launched its Kubernetes based enterprise container clustering solution ESContainer. EasyStack is now one of the top enterprise open source companies globally providing both OpenStack and Kubernetes (K8S) products.    

2016 witnessed tremendous market growth in container technology. As the leading OpenStack technology provider, EasyStack strongly believes in developing open cloud computing and container technologies and actively contributes to the innovation of the open source cloud computing platform. With memberships in the global container open standard organizations i.e. CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) and OCI (Open Container Initiative), EasyStack plays a strategic role in formulating the roadmap of these open source technology communities. To date, EasyStack is competitive globally in both OpenStack and Kubernetes core code contributions.  

"2017 was a proof point for many Chinese enterprises adopting container technologies in their organizations," said Liu Guohui, co-founder and CTO of EasyStack. "Containers are a credible alternative to PaaS due to its lightweight, fast and ease of deployment across multiple environments makes it the essential technology for deploying Cloud Native Applications. Having an enterprise container cluster deployment, operations and management platform enables organizations to effectively leverage container technology. Besides standalone implementations, majority of the enterprise-level container applications are deployed on OpenStack. Hence, having a combination of OpenStack and Kubernetes caters to many of the enterprises need for a complete open source cloud computing platform."    

Kubernetes Solves the "Last Mile" Complexities

ESContainer is designed for application based deployment and provides application management capability. As part of its user centric features, it allows applications to be deployed, published and  managed on the same platform; it actively optimizes stateful application resources based on usage behavior, and gives users convenience to build multi-layered applications based on micro services architecture. In terms of networking, ESContainer supports non-overlay layer 2 networks as well as many other types of common network functionality; including support for direct connections between container based applications and virtualized applications. Especially in the area of large scale container cluster deployment and management, ESContainer provides enhanced multilevel monitoring and log journaling to ensure smooth running environment support for both development and operations teams.

ESContainer has a rich set of enterprise-level management capabilities for container based applications and orchestration. It provides auto-deployment, enhanced user interfaces, marketplace for applications, multilevel monitoring, virtual machine instances, visual design application topology with mixed deployment nodes consisting of resource pools and physical host machines. The deep convergence between EasyStack's enterprise-level OpenStack platform ESCloud and the above mentioned ESContainer features, provides an integrated solution to seamlessly provide compute, network and storage resources enabled through the software defined infrastructure. This in turn transforms and leads the industry in the ability to offer enterprise cloud computing solutions from traditional data center resources driven based on cost to business line applications driven based on revenue.

Last but not least, ESCore a key foundational component in the EasyStack portfolio serves as the cloud computing Linux operating system tailored made and optimized for ESContainer, which provides an enhanced operating system suited for high performance, scalable and stable container operations supporting high density cluster deployment running on the underlying infrastructure environment.

Strengths of OpenStack+Kubernetes

The most appealing feature of ESContainer is that it integrates and fuses Kubernetes and OpenStack technologies by producing an end result that is far greater than the sum of two: ESCloud focuses on the data center infrastructure management and supports the operations of traditional business applications. ESContainer focuses on providing a one-stop platform for the transformation of applications in the new enterprise. These two solutions complement each other leading to the evolvement of an infrastructure platform well suited to solve issues arising from the consolidation of multiple heterogeneous data center environments, which in turn fuels and motivates innovation in enterprises.  

1) With the convergence of ESContainer and ESCloud; OpenStack Keystone services can be used as a secure user management repository for both OpenStack and Kubernetes solution components, providing systemwide authentication and authorization services across both platforms.    

2) OpenStack Cinder volumes can be used as a persistent storage backend in ESContainer, which comes with the vendor supported open source or enterprise versions storage equipment plugin functionality. This approach not only provides a default persistent storage mechanism for containers, it also resolves issues associated with insufficient support of Kubernetes when using enterprise storage equipment.

3) OpenStack Neutron LoadBalancer component can be configured as an external facing workload balancer service in ESContainer, providing high availability for container based application services.

4) OpenStack Neutron component can be configured as the Layer 2 network for the virtual network fabric in ESContainer. Both the virtual machine and container instances use the same network fabric provided by Neutron, thereby avoiding performance issues resulting from having to connect and transport across an overlay network. And since both the virtual machine and container instances are running in the same subnet, connectivity of Layer 2 network between the virtual machine and container application is allowed by default. This application scenario delivers immediate benefit to enterprises that favors co-existence of both the traditional and cloud native workloads and to exchange data directly between them.

5) Ability to deploy container clusters consisting of bare metal and virtual machine instances. Configuration based parameters to auto-scale resource pool according to different threshold levels.

In addition, Ceph can be used as persistent storage backend in ESContainer, allowing containers to make use of persistent data volumes to store information.    

This is the first major product launch announcement after EasyStack's US$50 million Series C funding round in January, 2017, which sets a momentum for having the largest single round funding in open source history. It enables EasyStack to provide a single pane of glass experience and to better meet enterprise users business and technology requirements through having a cloud computing platform that combines the best of both worlds in OpenStack and Kubernetes.    

About EasyStack
http://www.easystack.cn/en/

SOURCE EasyStack