Summary Bullets:
- Cloud leaders VMware and Microsoft separately announce new microservices including containerization management and orchestration.
- Currently, there is no better example highlighting the importance of PaaS than microservices, given their ability to simplify and automate the ‘under the covers’ tasks of app development/management such as ensuring scalability of high-performance and/or high-demand applications.
Two cloud heavyweights, VMware and Microsoft, have introduced their microservice efforts, unveiling unique strategies aimed at offering enterprises scalable cloud services. Numerous application platform and cloud providers are racing to build out their microservice architectures which intercept SOA and API technologies, an approach which decomposes complex applications into independent processes exposed through APIs. Currently, there is no better example highlighting the importance of PaaS than microservices for their ability to simplify and automate the ‘under the covers’ tasks of app development/management such as ensuring scalability of high-performance and/or high-demand applications.
Following the growing popularity of containerization of services/processes, helped along by leading vendor Docker, a need for management of those containerized workloads is an obvious next step. VMware stepped up this week with microservice enhancements that include identity/access management (Lightwave), a Linux OS (Photon) for containerized applications, and a new container management product (Lattice). Lattice, provided by Pivotal, provides an onramp for a broader developer audience looking to manage containerized workloads, featuring scheduling, HTTP routing, and log aggregation, using the same code as the Cloud Foundry PaaS. The technologies, based on open source projects, are aimed at easing app development via cloud-based platform services, and will leverage VMware’s vSphere VM customer base. The microservice will play largely into the company’s vCloud Air hybrid cloud platform.
As containers become more complex and include multiple components such as database and messaging, orchestration technology comes into play. Microsoft also made a microservice announcement called Azure Service Fabric, which leverages the company’s orchestration/automation technology, supporting both stateful and stateless microservices. Service Fabric is a component of Microsoft’s App Service, and the microservice offering also includes Visual Studio and application lifecycle management support.
Watch for a Market Advisory Report I’ll be issuing in coming months delving more deeply into microservice architectures with a roundup of key providers and opportunities.
IT Connection 