Shipa Launches ALM Platform for Kubernetes Apps
Fresh off raising $3.75 million in seed funding, Shipa today emerged from stealth to launch a namesake framework for managing the life cycle of applications running in Kubernetes environments.
Shipa CEO Bruno Andrade says Kubernetes lacks a way to enforce policies based on applications. The governance model of Kubernetes is based on individual objects, which makes it challenging to visualize and manage, notes Andrade.
Shipa automatically creates all required Kubernetes objects and configuration files for an application and deploys them to all clusters required. It then provides integrations with tools to manage and maintain application availability and security, says Andrade.
Application objects are created, deployed and monitored automatically, and an application dependency map makes it easier to visualize the environment, adds Andrade.
Shipa also creates an audit trail and provides canary and rollback management capabilities. Via an open application programming interface (API), it can also integrate with existing continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms, application performance management (APM) tools and incident management platforms.
That approach eliminates the need to creating Kubernetes and YAML files, developing custom scripts or rely on an opinionated platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment to abstract away the underlying complexity of the Kubernetes environment, adds Andrade.
Shipa can be applied to any distribution of Kubernetes and supports all instances of the Container Storage Interface (CSI) created by the open source Kubernetes community. That capability eliminates the need to create YAML or volume-related files.
Andrade says as organizations deploy more applications on Kubernetes clusters running in the cloud, local data centers and edge computing environments, they will need to determine to what degree they will want to manage Kubernetes infrastructure versus relying on an application lifecycle management (ALM) platform to automate those tasks. Every minute a DevOps team spends managing IT infrastructure is one less minute there is to focus on application development, he notes.
In fact, Andrade says there is a lot of resistance to Kubernetes starting to emerge among developers who find the environment requires too much effort to manage. As the number of cloud-native applications deployed on Kubernetes increases, managing all the clusters in an extended enterprise will quickly become unsustainable in the absence of a tool that automates ALM, says Andrade.
In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s more focus than ever on developer productivity. Organizations are embracing containers and Kubernetes in theory to build microservices-based applications that are more resilient than monolithic applications faster. However, if the application development experience is suboptimal, many will simply continue to build monolithic applications using tools and platforms they already know.
There’s general agreement that microservices represent a better way to build and maintain complex software over the long term. However, as the barrier to entry building microservices-based applications remains high, the number of developers building those applications is likely to remain constrained for the foreseeable future. In effect, developers need a better abstraction for a platform that abstracts infrastructure in a way that many development teams still find challenging to master.
