Cloudify Orchestration Platform Forms Basis for New Company
How important have orchestration tools grown? Important enough for GigaSpaces to spin off Cloudify, which offers orchestration for containers, cloud applications and much more, into a company of its own.
The move, which Cloudify announced July 27, makes Cloudify one of the first standalone companies dedicated solely to providing orchestration solutions.
Cloudify’s platform is designed to solve the orchestration challenges that companies typically face when they deploy multiple applications across diverse types of infrastructure.
Most orchestrators are designed to support only certain types of apps or environments. For example, you can use Juju to orchestrate the deployment of apps to the cloud, but Juju is not typically used to deploy Docker containers. (It actually can deploy them, although it doesn’t provide the management services of container orchestrators.)
Meanwhile, Swarm, Kubernetes, Marathon and other orchestrators are designed to work primarily with containers, not any type of application running in the cloud.
Things get even more complicated when you have a hybrid cloud architecture with workloads spread across public, private or managed cloud environments, or when you use multiple public clouds concurrently.
Cloudify’s product is designed to resolve this complexity by providing a one-stop shopping solution for deploying and monitoring any type of application across a mix of cloud environments.
Spinning Off Cloudify
The announcement that GigaSpaces will spin off Cloudify doesn’t affect the Cloudify product. It will continue to work the same.
For the container ecosystem, however, there’s an interesting bit of news here. This announcement is a sign of just how supremely important orchestration has become not just for container environments, but for all modern workloads. That trend owes much to the advent of container technology.
Orchestration tools existed before containers became popular. However, the goal of deploying complex containerized applications on a large scale is possible only when using orchestrators. Containers helped to make orchestration tools that provide automated deployment and management the sine qua non of modern data centers, for Docker workloads and far beyond.
