Mirantis this week rolled out Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes, an instance of the open source cloud management framework in which all the components have been encapsulated in containers.

Shaun O’Meara, global field CTO at Mirantis, says that approach makes it possible to then employ Kubernetes to orchestrate those containers.

Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes is the first in a planned series of enhancements to the Mirantis Cloud Native Platform, a family of offerings based on Kubernetes that includes Mirantis Container Cloud, the container platform formerly known as Docker Enterprise that Mirantis acquired last year.

O’Meara says the goal is to make it easier to deploy, manage and update a widely employed cloud management framework that continues to be advanced under the auspices of the Open Infrastructure Foundation, formerly known as The OpenStack Foundation.

That approach also makes it possible to deploy OpenStack on either a virtual machine or on a bare-metal server, notes O’Meara. Even the kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) foundation on which OpenStack is most frequently deployed has been encapsulated in a container, he says.

Bare-metal instances of Kubernetes are gaining traction among financial service firms, organizations that are building artificial intelligence (AI) applications based on machine learning algorithms and telecommunications carriers—all of which trying to minimize the overhead a virtual machine adds to an IT environment, notes O’Meara.

OpenStack is most widely employed by telecommunications carriers and other IT service providers as an open source alternative to a commercial stack of virtual machine software from VMware. That approach enables organizations to deploy a cloud framework at scale without incurring massive software licensing costs.

The OpenStack framework has seen less adoption among enterprise IT organizations, but O’Meara notes that since the transition to cloud-native computing began, adoption of OpenStack has increased as organizations look to deploy containerized applications at scale. Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes will enable both service providers and enterprise IT organizations to expand their reliance on OpenStack using the same Kubernetes orchestration engine they already employ to manage containers in what are now highly distributed computing environments, he says.

That approach ultimately serves to reduce the total cost of managing IT environments that need to be able to run both cloud-native applications and legacy monolithic applications, he adds.

Longer-term, the convergence of Kubernetes and OpenStack should reduce the level of tension that surrounds both platforms. As Kubernetes continues to evolve, there are those that advocate the platform will one day replace OpenStack with a set of cloud-native extensions. The Mirantis approach effectively turns all the components that make up OpenStack today into a set of containers that run natively on Kubernetes. Previously, organizations could deploy OpenStack on Kubernetes, but each component was not a set of containers that could be individually orchestrated.

Of course, Kubernetes today is more commonly deployed on OpenStack and VMware because it provides a method for provisioning a complex platform using a familiar set of IT management tools. However, as cloud-native computing environments continue to expand, the relationship between the components that make us a management framework and Kubernetes are clearly still evolving.

As Docker Inc. approaches the first anniversary of a business reset following the sale of its enterprise business to Mirantis Inc. last November, executives are declaring its new developer focus a success. Now Docker needs to navigate the path to profitability selling to that notoriously cost-sensitive audience.

In a briefing with journalists on Tuesday, Docker executives said their strategy of reducing the complexity of working with the software containers it invented more than seven years ago is gaining traction. The proof: 11.3 million monthly active users sharing applications from 7.9 million images on Docker Hub repositories with 13.6 billion code pulls per month.

Chief Executive Scott Johnston (pictured) said that’s up 70% from last year. “We’ve come a long way in building a sustainable business focused on developers,” he said.

The company is staying true to the commitment made a year ago to build an ecosystem of independent software vendors around its Docker Desktop development workbench and Docker Hub image repository. “Having learned what makes a successful code environment, we’ve gone out of our way to include ecosystem partners in what we do rather than go it on our own,” Johnston said, citing the example of the Open Container Initiative the company set up in 2015 under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation.

Playing nicely with others
Among the actions, the company has taken in the past year to deliver on that promise are a landmark partnership with Microsoft Corp. that integrates Microsoft’s Azure public cloud and Virtual Studio Code code editor with Docker Desktop. There’s also a deal with Snyk Ltd. to deliver a native vulnerability scanning service for container images. Not least is an agreement with Amazon Web Services Inc. to create a simplified workflow for developers using Docker Compose to build applications for Amazon’s Elastic Container Service and Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate.

Integration with Atlassian Corp. PLC’s Bitbucket and the Microsoft-owned GitHub code repositories has made Docker Hub a nexus for integrating, configuring and managing application components. The company also released its Compose toolset for building multicontainer applications to open source in March.

The net result of the alliances has been to “remove so much complexity from the developer as far as configuring, provisioning and standing up infrastructure in those clouds,” Johnston said. “With two commands a developer can get an application from its local place up to one of those cloud endpoints.”

He said there are now 160 ISV Docker images available from 94 verified publishers and that interest is growing. “The more partners who work with us the more partners want to join us,” he said.

Path to profitability
Now the company needs to build that momentum into a profitable business, something it was unable to do despite raising $260 million in the four years after releasing its container technology. Toward that end, the company next week will initiate a series of price hikes for its heaviest users, marking its first step toward usage-based pricing.

Docker’s generous free plan, which gives developers unlimited public repositories and one private repository, is “not economically sustainable when we have tens of millions of developers today and tens of millions more coming tomorrow,” the CEO said. “A small subset of our user base is over-consuming.” The adjustments are intended to “make sure that subset isn’t consuming to a negative for the rest of the users. The vast majority of users will continue consuming for free.”

Over the next 12 months developers should expect to see new prepackaged development environments similar to those the company rolled out for Python and Node.js earlier this year, expanded set of tools for managing images, better ways for teams to move applications into the cloud and additions to its list of Docker Certified Images and Docker Verified Publishers.

Despite past missteps under previous leadership, Docker has the luxury of patient investors, Johnston said. Insight Venture Partners LP and Benchmark Capital Partners LLC, which together plowed $35 million into the reborn company last year “are more interested in scaling to the market that’s there rather than profitability,” Johnston said. “They see an unbelievable market we created when open sourced in 2013 and we are in a phenomenal position to be a leading company in that market.

Increased speed to market is one of the biggest benefits of adopting new cloud computing technology. For most companies this means increased return on investment; but when it comes to the healthcare industry, getting drugs to market fast is about more than driving profit. It’s about saving lives and improving life quality for those affected by disease.

Today, as COVID-19 holds the world in its grip, optimizing the research and development pipeline is more critical than ever. Healthcare technology has been a beneficiary of the pandemic as a switch to telehealth creates a groundswell of investment and research into ways to diagnose and treat patients virtually. But what about creating medicines or a vaccine for the virus?

GSK multiplies ‘science x technology x culture’ to improve the R&D pipeline
Multinational pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline PLC is one of the largest drug developers in the world. With an R&D approach that multiplies science, technology and culture together, GSK aims to “deliver better medicines to more patients, faster.”

“Here at GSK, we allow science to drive the technology. This helps us to build innovative products that helps our scientists to make better and faster additions throughout the drug discovery pipeline,” said Vishnu Chelle, engineering manager of DevOps engineering, at GlaxoSmithKline.

Speaking during a live session at Mirantis Launchpad 2020, Chelle discussed how GSK has leveraged Docker Enterprise to revolutionize its internal pipeline for scientific research and development.

The basis of GSK’s R&D is the company’s data platform, which provides a centralized resource for research information that can be accessed by scientific teams across the globe. Previous to 2015, the companies 10,000+ scientists worked in siloed teams with little ability to collaborate on research.

“There wasn’t really an ability to share that information across the R&D organization and to use the power of the aggregation of that information to make better decisions,” said Mark Ramsey, the R&D chief data and analytics officer responsible for building the platform.

Based on Docker Enterprise, now part of Mirantis Inc., the platform has undergone constant evolution since its inception four years ago. Originally known as the R&D information platform, or RDIP, it was developed to centralize, curate and rationalize R&D data in order to drive strategic business value, according to Chelle, who listed standardized clinical trials, genome-wide association study analysis, and processing of real-world evidence data as some of the first use-case examples.

“Now a new set of business levels are changing our landscape,” Chelle stated. “The R&D information platform is evolving to be a hybrid multicloud solution and is known as R&D data platform.”

GSK’s container journey started in late 2017, when the company started working with Docker Enterprise. The focus for the first year was testing, making sure the platform was stable before uploading data or applications. By 2019, GSK was uploading data and deploying applications in a production environment. At the same time, Kubernetes orchestration was added to the Docker Enterprise platform as the default orchestrator, and by the beginning of 2020 the company had migrated all its microservices onto the platform.

“We have made the container-first approach as an architecture standard across R&D tech in GSK,” Chelle stated. “Our goal was to make this platform agile [and] … work at scale.” One main goal was for R&D users to be able to consume the data and services available on the platform seamlessly in a self-service fashion.

“Docker Enterprise allows GSK to support a multitude of tools and technologies and interfaces so that scientists can run data analysis at scale,” stated Ranjith Raghunath, senior director and product director of data platform and data services (R&D Tech) at GlaxoSmithKline, in a Mirantis case study examining GSK’s implementation of Docker Enterprise.
Edge Node On Demand brings agility to GSK data platform
One of the major accomplishments of the platform evolution was the creation of Edge Node On Demand for rapid prototyping and multi-cluster communication.

“Edge Node On Demand is a project where we spin up containers on demand effectively to provide an agile platform for the business,” Raghunath said.

That agility directly impacts the R&D pipeline, bringing tasks that previously would have taken from three to six months down to — in some cases — as little as a few minutes.

“We’ve seen that already happen, whether it be in clinical trials with digital devices, or the secondary use of data and clinical trials to better predict patient populations, or the precision medicine initiative, or genetics or genomics. All of this plays a factor,” Raghunath said. “Technology can enable us to get to the next horizon quickly.”

Thanks to the Docker Enterprise platform, GSK has not only created an easily accessible database for global scientific collaboration, but has hit the big data goal of “more, better, faster, cheaper” when it comes to delivering critical medicines to those who need them.

“By making Docker image as an immutable artifact in our build process, we are now able to deploy our apps or models in any container or Kubernetes based platform, either in on-prem or in a public cloud,” Chelle stated. “By migrating all our web services into containers, we not only achieve horizontal scalability for those specific services, but also save more than 50% in support costs for the applications which we have migrated.”