Appcito recently announced CAFE for Docker, a unified application front-end
service accelerating the development of apps on the Docker Platform. To find
out more, I spoke with Kamal Anand, CEO of Appcito.
VMblog: Why is
Unified Application Service for Docker important?
Kamal Anand: With the
massive surge of Docker's popularity among the DevOps crowd, the Appcito team
realized we had a golden opportunity to offer something that can help teams
achieve development goals faster, with a more elegant solution compared to
other competitors. The bottom line is
that CAFE for Docker extends the power of
unified application delivery to applications developed on Docker so that developers
can fully focus on writing applications and not infrastructure.
Besides
addressing the key problem of easily load balancing across multiple Docker
containers in a VM, our unified, easy-to-consume, multi-cloud offering supports
continuous deployment and enhances the key benefits of using Docker for
application development - agility, portability and maintainability.
VMblog: What
specific benefits does Appcito's Docker CAFE service offer?
Anand: Supporting the Docker platform,
Appcito's Cloud Application Front End (CAFE) service unifies all the
application delivery services including advanced load balancing, application
security, continuous deployment, performance optimization, and application analytics
and insights needed for delivering business-critical Docker containerized
applications.
Two specific benefits, among many I could discuss, include rapid proxy
deployment and advanced insights and information about traffic. CAFE PEP proxies, can be quickly deployed,
reconfigured or removed without changes to microservices or other components of
the application stack. Quick onboarding and
central management of granular application policies via a web based user
interface significantly reduce administrative overhead. Regarding insights, CAFE's cloud-native
Insights Engine provides extensive visibility into various aspects of your
applications' behavior. Specifically, you can monitor real-time application
performance, analyze traffic characteristics and workloads, troubleshoot using
user logs and analytics, and detect anomalies for security, performance and
other purposes.
VMblog: In which cloud environments can the service
run?
Anand: The CAFE for Docker
software-as-a-service offering is designed for Docker containers running in AWS,
OpenStack, VMware and Azure environments. Purpose-built to help agile
application operations teams, CAFE for Docker can be deployed in any cloud,
including private enterprise clouds, providing unprecedented flexibility of
choice of infrastructure platform environments.
VMblog: And how does Appcito CAFE work in practice?
Anand: CAFE acts as a reverse proxy and load balancer and offers
additional integrated capabilities in the areas of content optimization and
acceleration, application security, protection against various DDoS attacks and
BOTs as well as simplified continuous delivery of applications along with
continuous insights at all levels. These additional capabilities can
easily be configured on an application level or at micro-services level by
DevOps.
Located strategically close to applications inside cloud data centers,
Appcito CAFE accelerates and simplifies application delivery. In less than five
minutes, DevOps and enterprise IT teams can configure application delivery
services that ensure enterprise applications and micro services are fast,
secure, reliable and elastic.
VMblog: Can
you tell us the availability and pricing?
Anand: Appcito CAFE for Docker is available now for
AWS, and will be available for OpenStack in Q2 2015. Appcito offers a 30-day
free trial of CAFE. Subscriptions are available at three levels - Starter,
Business and Enterprise - with rates beginning at $50 per application per month
for the Starter level.
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Thank you to Kamal Anand, CEO of Appcito, for taking time out to speak with VMblog about CAFE for Docker.