The First Enterprise-Grade Container Management Platform For Cloud-Native and Legacy Applications

Apcera, the leader in enterprise container management, today announced its container management platform for cloud-native and legacy applications. The company also announced it has expanded integration features to further support Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS), Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure, providing seamless movement of workloads across virtually any infrastructure and resulting in friction-free multi-cloud mobility for containers.

As enterprises adopt cloud infrastructure and leverage modern architectures, they can’t afford to turn their back on existing applications -- and investments. The challenge, however, is that legacy applications are expensive-to-maintain, inflexible due to infrastructure requirements and dependencies, and not built for the cloud. While modern, cloud-native workloads can be easily containerized in test and dev scenarios, to date, there has been no true solution for easily bringing legacy workloads into the modern era, at enterprise scale.

Enterprises Deserve Better

Apcera is a flexible, enterprise-grade container management platform that can deploy, orchestrate and govern cloud-native and legacy applications across on-premises, cloud or hybrid environments. Complete out of the box, Apcera provides container workflow, orchestration, scheduling, storage, networking, plus a container engine, delivering a complete, enterprise-ready solution for businesses. With strong capabilities around containerizing legacy applications and workloads, Apcera gives enterprises investment protection while delivering industry-leading agility and time-to-value, all with full security and control.

According to Dan Conde, analyst at leading research firm, ESG, the Apcera Platform is “a container management platform that is designed for legacy and modern applications with security and trustworthy operations in mind. Apcera’s suitability for production as well as its use of policy and governance, differentiates it from other solutions on the market.”

“Apcera has an enterprise-first approach to container management, and customers regularly turn to us to help modernize legacy applications as well as to run Docker securely and at scale,” said Mark Thiele, chief strategy officer for Apcera. “This announcement underscores our commitment to delivering a practical, real-world solution for container management that addresses the needs of enterprise IT as they increasingly move workloads to the cloud.”

Key features of the Apcera enterprise-grade container management platform include:

• Legacy and cloud native: Enterprises can now easily modernize applications, not only simplifying, but also enabling the deployment of legacy, cloud native and microservices applications.

• Secure by default: With the Apcera platform, there are no open doors. The system can only function as permitted by policy; workloads only run where enterprises want and can use only instructed and intended resources.

• Advanced networking: Network nano-segmentation delivers container-level application of policy, allowing workloads to move across infrastructures at the speed of deployment and orchestration in a fully secure and compliant manner, while policy-based firewalls remain at the container level. Nano-segmentation provides the most powerful governance and application security available, through a real-time, software-defined network that manages all network communication across a multi-cloud infrastructure.

• True hybrid mobility: Enterprises can now treat their entire infrastructures as a single cluster. The Apcera platform enables fast and seamless portability across on-premises, cloud or hybrid environments without breaking dependencies or governance.

Additionally, Apcera has expanded platform integration features to further support Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS), Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure. New platform features for Enterprise and Community Editions include:

• App Tokens and Authentication enables jobs to obtain an access token to make API calls or run APC commands without having to authenticate against an external identity system, such as LDAP or Google

• The Event System API allows users to consume information and events directly from any Apcera cluster about resource usage, network ingress/egress bandwidths, external services usage, and other changes applied to the system.

• Multi-Resource Manifests allow users to streamline the process of creating Docker images or mapping existing packages to job links, service bindings and resource specifications as well as the creation of virtual networks with JSON files and upgraded features.

"Apcera's policy-driven container management platform aims to address the enterprise need to support not only containerized and cloud-native applications, but modernization of existing x86 and other applications as well," said Jay Lyman, principal analyst for cloud management and containers at 451 Research. "Apcera's focus on enterprise-grade security and scale also matches growing desire by organizations to push containers to production in a trusted manner."