Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

Forrester Research recently released The Forrester New Wave: Enterprise Container Platform Software Suites, Q4 2018, a comprehensive assessment of the enterprise container platform (ECP) market, hoping to provide an authoritative reference for enterprises with container needs, and comprehensively ranked the top eight enterprise container platform providers, ranked in order: Docker, Red Hat, Rancher Labs, Pivotal, Mesosphere, IBM, SUSE, Platform 9.

Focus of the report

Docker, Rancher Labs and Red Hat lead the enterprise container cloud market

In Forrester's Forrester New Wave of Enterprise Container Platforms (similar to Gartner's Magic Quadrant), Docker, Rancher Labs, and Red Hat are the outstanding leaders in the enterprise container management platform market. Pivotal, Mesosphere and IBM were among the top performers. SUSE and Platform9 are competitors.

User experience, application lifecycle management, APIs and integration are key differentiators

Forrester found that external integration and application lifecycle management are key capabilities to help users build, connect, scale, and operate container-based applications in multi-cloud environments. A product that provides users with a rich and consistent development and operations experience can greatly simplify and accelerate enterprise adoption of container technology and the platform.

10 evaluation criteria for enterprise-level container platforms

Forrester New Wave's research and analysis of enterprise container platforms is based on 10 criteria: runtime and orchestration, image management, operations and maintenance operations, security, user experience, application lifecycle management, integration and APIs, product vision, product roadmap, and market approach.

Detailed explanation of the 10 assessment criteria

Forester rated the eight most important enterprise container platform providers one by one according to the 10 criteria mentioned above. The ratings were divided into three categories, with the upward arrow meaning "excellent performance," the horizontal equal sign meaning "meets the standards," and the downward arrow meaning "needs improvement."

Among them, Rancher Labs performed particularly well in five items of runtime and orchestration, image management, security, product vision and product roadmap, and five items of operation and maintenance operation, user experience, application lifecycle management, integration and API, and market method also met the standards and were above the industry average, which is why they deserved to be ranked as "Excellent Leader" of Forrester New Wave Enterprise Container Platform.

Forrester and Enterprise Customer Reviews of Rancher

In the report, Forrester Research commented on Rancher's enterprise-class Kubernetes management platform as follows:

Powerful multi-cloud orchestration and security: Rancher's unified multi-cluster Kubernetes management platform supports multiple public cloud and on-premises infrastructure platforms. It has highly customizable access control, policy enforcement, resource isolation, and mirror scanning.

For enterprise users looking for an open source product with the need to manage Kubernetes across clouds, Rancher is the best choice: Rancher provides users with a powerful combination of multi-cloud cluster management, a minimal operational experience and policy enforcement on a stable, well-supported container platform.

Also, in Forrester's survey of enterprise customers, enterprise users particularly appreciated Rancher's multi-cloud platform support, strong Kubernetes support and enhancements, and a unique easy-to-use experience not seen on many other platforms.

"Rancher provides a platform for different cloud environments that is friendly and compatible with all environments and underlying architectures. "

"Rancher is a radical, complete simplification and innovation of the open source stack. "

Forrester's recommendations for user adoption of enterprise-class container platforms

The Enterprise Container Platform (ECP) provides a container-based development environment with container execution, orchestration, integration, security, and management capabilities designed to configure and control container clusters across multiple on-premises and cloud infrastructure platforms.

The container market is young, vibrant, and maturing as enterprise users look to deploy containerized applications and container clusters faster, easier, and more securely in their own data centers and, increasingly, in the public cloud, and technology vendors compete to meet these needs. In this emerging market, remember:

Your DevOps skills and needs determine your platform priorities. Many companies primarily use ECP to accelerate software development processes, gain DevOps maturity, and view container platforms as automated continuous delivery platforms--dimensions where the developer experience is critical. For others, operations is paramount; they have a hard time learning how to manage and scale multiple Kubernetes clusters they create themselves. And there are those who want someone else to manage the experience. Before deciding which platform to use, you need to know where you are on this spectrum.

The same core open source technology underpins all leading container platforms. Each vendor we evaluated supports key open source components such as Docker container formats, Kubernetes orchestration, Prometheus monitoring, and Grafana visualization, with varying degrees of customization and enhancement. Some offer Cloud Foundry options, some offer orchestration alternatives, and some participate in upstream projects hosted by CNCF or others. Do you want to participate and contribute? Or do you want to rely on your vendor to curate and enhance the best open source components for you? Start by knowing whether you want to build or consume platforms, or both.

Your best solution may be a hybrid platform driven by specific use cases. Many of the vendors in our assessment already have proven experience helping enterprises accelerate container-based and microservice development for specific types of applications or use cases. You might be more interested in modernizing data-driven applications, finding IoT-focused container platforms, or just integrating existing legacy versions of. NET or Java monoliths together. Several customers we interviewed used one solution for cloud-native microservices (full platform-as-a-service) and another for older legacy code (a less self-righteous container-as-a-service); others preferred a single trusted vendor relationship.

Rankings of the eight leading enterprise container platform providers

Open, innovative and friendly, Rancher shines as a container management platform

The openness, friendliness, compatibility and innovation of the Rancher platform mentioned by Forrester are exactly the product philosophy and vision that Rancher has always had. Rancher is friendly and compatible with all Kubernetes in the industry. It never forces the use of a Kubernetes distribution, a cloud platform, an integrated deployment and monitoring tool, or a storage, operating system, etc. The model of avoiding technology lock-in has also won wide acclaim in the industry. The courage and philosophy of 100% open source has led Rancher to more than 100 million enterprise downloads and more than 20,000 enterprise deployments worldwide.

Also interesting (must be a special fate), Forrester's report suggests that Rancher's improvements include operations management. The product version reviewed in this report is Rancher 2.0, and in Rancher 2.1, the biggest enhancement is the optimization of Kubernetes cluster operations, including allowing users to snapshot and export the complete configuration of Kubernetes clusters managed by Rancher, and then restore Kubernetes clusters by importing the same configuration files.

In Rancher 2.1, the enhancements and optimizations happen to be:

More authentication methods

Dispel container function

Project quota management

Enhanced application management capabilities

CICD enhanced to support GitLab

Extended Command Line Interface (CLI)

High availability mode enhancement

App Store optimizations and enhancements

More importantly, Rancher has always been praised by a large number of users worldwide for its simple and intuitive interface style and operating experience, which is easy to use and greatly solves the problem of poor usability and steep learning curve of Kubernetes native UI, which has been left over by the industry for a long time, so that enterprises have a more convenient way to land Kubernetes in production environment.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.