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Apcera Releases Production-Grade Community Edition Designed
April 2016 by Emmanuelle Lamandé
Apcera released a free community version of its cloud platform. Apcera Platform Community Edition (CE) lets developers and IT teams build a working compute cluster in as little as 15 minutes on a laptop, or in a small cloud computing environment.
Apcera CE provides developers, DevOps teams and ITOps departments the following capabilities:
– One-click Docker deploys - Developers can click to deploy standard Docker images of widely used software packages, which are brought up with networking and security settings already pre-configured.
– Flexible development - Teams can effectively work from anywhere while creating a personal compute cluster to test and develop production-ready apps on their own terms, on a laptop or in a public or private cloud.
– Comprehensive security and governance - Users have full access to the Apcera Policy Engine and all of the platform’s security and governance capabilities to experiment with granular policy setups, such as resource control, network and service access, software versioning and control over workload placement and scheduling.
– Native container support - Apcera CE was designed from inception as a trusted and secure container management platform for containers, including Docker images.
– Simplified staging, service discovery and cloud API access - CE automatically detects frameworks for simplified environment staging. It also automates the discovery of databases and external cloud APIs.
– Default persistent storage - Apcera’s Community Edition includes NFS-based, infrastructure independent storage by default, not just external connectivity. Persistent storage for jobs, including Docker jobs, enables users to move workloads within their own cluster or to other compute infrastructures and cloud platforms.
– Default support for languages, databases, and services - CE supports major programming languages (Java, Node.js, Ruby and Python), the most popular web databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB), external services (S3), configuration tools (Chef, Puppet) and common compute platforms (AWS, Azure, OpenStack, VMware and VirtualBox).
Developers can immediately and securely set up databases and services within their cluster, connect to external services and build real applications without assistance from IT Operations or DevOps teams. In turn, DevOps and IT teams that want to give their developers a flexible environment still enjoy built-in audit trails, health monitoring and other capabilities that are traditionally delivered as separate services or only available in enterprise editions of software.
In parallel with Apcera CE, Apcera has also released Libretto, a set of open source libraries for provisioning workloads on different cloud and virtualization providers. Libretto powers Apcera’s own multi-cloud provisioning but can also be used as standalone software. This is the latest open source contribution by Apcera, which also supports the open source NATS messaging system and the Kurma container management platform.
