The microservice world seems to have decided on two layers of the stack:
- Docker for containers
- Kubernetes to Orchestrate the containers
The level "below" (cloud service) may be hosted on something like AWS, or on premises.
The level above (application management) is less clear. The leading contenders are RedHat's OpenShift and Docker Enterprise, with Pivotal's Application Manager competing against them.
The interesting thing: there's no free software available for the application management layer. You can download and use Docker or Kubernetes, but you can't do the same with OpenShift and so on.
Is this an space begging for an OpenSource project, or am I missing something?
Top comments (4)
You are missing that OKD is the upstream open source of OpenShift which is at okd.io/ and it is entirely open source on GitHub at github.com/openshift/origin I wrote some posts about how we use the SaaS version as it's easier and more cost effective than renting and managing our own set of vms to run the free version at dev.to/simbo1905/git-driven-infras...
Thank you, that's exactly what I was searching for. When I was researching OpenShift a few years ago, I'd seen something similar to this (not sure what it was called), and there as also a lot of material around the fabric8.io project.
Looking at fabric8.io now, it seems to be very quiet. Do you happen to know if that project is very active?
Well looking at the core tech on fabric8.io it says that it has Jenkins, Nexus, Gogs and JBoss Forge for CI/CD templates, presumably integrated with Jenkins. Yet OpenShift has built-in Jenkins integration for making and promoting images there is a book “Devops On OpenShift” that RedHat let you download for free that covers that openshift.com/devops-with-openshift/. In our case we use GitHub private repos and CircleCI for continuous integration. We use OpenShift BuildConfig objects to make release builds that I will write about in my next post. We dont need to pay for capacity for running Jenkins as we dont need. Yet it is right there in the app catalog of the SaaS openshift or I can easily set it up on the free version as all the templates are open source. We don’t need Gogs use use GitHub. We don’t need Nexus. All our config and deployments are via git push and we can see what is going on with builds and deployments in the openshift console app.
If someone doesn’t have OKD (aka openshift) so they only have vanilla Kubernetes, and they cannot use SaaS for builds such as GitHub, Bitbucket Pipelines, GitLab, and they don't already have Cloudbees Enterprise Jenkins, Nexus Enterprise and GitHub Enterprise or Stash or GitLab on-prem, then perhaps fabric8 is a great start. The startup I set up the pipelines for uses SaaS openshift.com and can use SaaS circleci. All the big firms I have worked at have Cloudbees Enterprise Jenkins or Team City, and an entreprise Git solution. I am sure fabric8 is good but I would be surprised to find large or small companies using it.