ElasticBox announced a new version of their product today that enhances Container support. In yet another example of how important Containers are becoming to today’s software development scene, ElasticBox will now allow you to define microservices as Docker files in containers.
Other enhancements include (from the press release) :
UI Enhancement: Tags now make it easier to sort and find items quickly throughout the product. The rich interface enables IT Ops and Development teams to visually assess the latest status of instances, share and manage boxes, and collaborate easily.
Deployment Policies: New functionality allows policies to be boxes, enabling customers to share virtual infrastructure resources from providers like AWS (Amazon Web Services) without having to expose AWS account specifics. Policies have claims that enable IT Ops to tag virtual machine properties, such as platform, instance type, OS family and more. Like all boxes, these deployment policies are reusable and sharable.
Script Boxes: Script boxes are powerful building blocks that can be shared and reused. Variables and script events are stored here. With the addition of requirements, Script boxes have tags to identify the platform, runtime and infrastructure dependencies of the box. At the time of deployment, the requirements and policy claims can be easily married, so developers can self-service the appropriate infrastructure, and IT Ops has the reassurance that the right infrastructure resources are being consumed.
Automatic Updates: With semantic versioning of boxes, customers can now choose automatic updates for major, minor and patches of instances. This enables rapid, efficient updates at scale for enterprises.
Enhanced Container Support: As more customers experiment and deploy to containers, ElasticBox can now support containers, such as Docker, as a new box type. This enables enterprises to define microservices as Dockerfiles in containers, which then can be linked via bindings. With this enhancement, the lifecycle of application services can be easily managed.
vCloud Air and vCloud Director Support: ElasticBox supports a multitude of private and public cloud infrastructure providers. Enterprises with VMWare’s vCloud Air or vCloud Director workloads can now leverage ElasticBox for complete workload automation. At deploy time, ElasticBox auto provisions vApps, one template per VM, and orchestrates automation.
I had a chance to speak with Carol Carpenter, CEO of ElasticBox on the new release:
Q. Why is this latest release so important?
As DevOps matures, we see that companies seek to not only provision applications faster but reduce inter-dependencies between development, QA, and IT Ops. Kill the cruft in the application cycle.
This latest release of ElasticBox brings deployment policies for DevOps to retain needed control and visibility while enhanced container support delivers more flexibility to application teams.
Q. What’s changed?
Many enterprises have built their application deployment workflows around a handcrafted potpourri of tools and processes. When faced with scale challenges from the business, existing tools are fragile and expensive in terms of failed builds and troubleshooting time. ElasticBox brings an adaptive off-the-shelf management solution so enterprises can spend less time re-tooling and more time shipping code.
Q. What’s next?
ElasticBox is built by developers who want to ship code faster to the cloud, and we’re committed to this mission. We’ll continue to ensure our platform adapts to customers’ evolving environments, regardless of which technologies they choose for their development and operational stack.
More information on the new release can be gleaned from ElasticBox CTO Alberto Arias Maestro’s blog.
DevOps.com is working with ElasticBox on a new DevOps survey right now. You can take the survey and win an Amazon Gift Card or 3dr Drone by taking the survey here.
