Datawise.io Provides More Granular Control over Kubernetes Environments

Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2016

With the release of the next major update of the open source Kubernetes orchestration framework for managing containers such as Docker, IT organizations should get some much needed granular control over networking and storage resources.

At the KubeCon 2015 conference today, Datawise.io, which is building management tools for containers, announced that it is contributing extensions to Kubernetes that will make it simpler to manage I/O resource scheduling. While IT organizations have deployed containers and Kubernetes, Mark Balch, head of product for Datawise.io, says it currently requires a fair amount of engineering expertise to deploy applications in a production environment, largely because of all the manual effort associated with configuring and optimizing the data tier underneath those applications.

Balch says the extensions being provided by Datawise.io in a version 1.2 release of Kubernetes, due out in January, will give IT organizations that embrace containers the ability to specify what level of I/O performance and network bandwidth a “cloud native” application can consume.

Specifically, the Kubernetes scheduler will invoke Datawise.io extensions to select the ideal location for each workload in the cluster without the need for code changes, tweaking or customizations. As such, the Datawise.io extensions will make it simpler for the average administer to deploy applications that invoke Kubernetes in a production environment, says Balch.

Usage of containers in general and Kubernetes specifically has been on the rise in application development and testing environments. But before either of those technologies makes it into the average IT organization, a lot of work still needs to be done on making them easier to consume. Starting in 2016, it would appear that at least as far as Kubernetes is concerned, much progress on that front is about to be made.