DEVOPSdigest

RightScale announced the availability of RightScale Container Manager, which allows enterprises to manage containers alongside traditional workloads.

RightScale Container Manager provides universal visibility, monitoring, and management of Docker containers across clouds as well as virtual and bare-metal servers.

RightScale found in its 2016 State of the Cloud Report that Docker use has doubled in the past year to 29 percent of enterprises, and that Docker could soon become the most popular DevOps tool. RightScale has recently migrated its own SaaS platform to Docker containers, and RightScale customers have also been increasing their usage of containers.

“RightScale Container Manager will help customers operate more efficiently by incorporating Docker containers into their heterogeneous environments,” said Tim Miller, vice president of engineering at RightScale. “We recently migrated 49 internal RightScale services, representing 665 out of 1,028 cloud instances, to Docker. By increasing server density, we cut the number of instances needed to support those services by 55 percent and reduced the cost by 53 percent. Just as importantly we increased agility by reducing cycle times for development.”

The new RightScale Container Manager complements RightScale’s existing capabilities for provisioning containerized infrastructure and managing Docker hosts. With the addition of RightScale Container Manager, customers can now provision and manage containers, clusters, and containerized applications as well as their non-containerized infrastructure from a single console. RightScale also complements cluster managers such as Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos by managing the underlying infrastructure pools and the applications running in the cluster.

RightScale Container Manager provides all the tools needed to monitor and manage the use of containers across all resource pools including public and private cloud, bare metal, and vSphere:

- Automated container discovery: RightScale continually discovers which containers are running on which hosts across all resource pools and provides visibility into all running containers in the RightScale console.

- Automatic container tagging: RightScale makes tracking containers easier by automatically tagging container hosts with the container image, name, and ID (SHA).

- Search and filter on containers: RightScale users can quickly find containers with particular images or tags so that they can run a script or perform an application-specific operation.

- Automatic container monitoring: RightScale users can view monitoring metrics for each container as well as for the Docker host — identifying bottlenecks when a containerized application is slow or uncovering excess capacity in a host.

- Container alerts: RightScale administrators can configure alerts and escalations based on container metrics.

- Self-healing: RightScale users can automatically kick off actions or scripts if predefined thresholds are exceeded by individual containers or a Docker host.