Apcera

Last updated
Apcera
TypePrivate
IndustryTechnology
Software
Founded2012
FounderDerek Collison
HeadquartersSan Francisco, CA
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Derek Collison (CEO)
Number of employees
120 (2016)
Website apcera.com

Apcera is an American cloud infrastructure company that provides a container management platform [1] to deploy, orchestrate and govern containers and applications across on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure.

Contents

Company Overview

Apcera was founded in 2012 in San Francisco by Derek Collison, previously a technology leader at Google, TIBCO and VMware (where he designed the first open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Cloud Foundry).

Apcera’s primary offering, the Apcera Cloud Platform, provides IT governance and security through a policy driven model, allowing for the safe deployment and management of cloud-native applications, microservices, legacy applications, as well as IT resources, network and services access, and user permissions.

According to Forbes [Tech], the Apcera Cloud Platform enables clients "to manage the migration from legacy infrastructure to newer approaches and... allows them to achieve significantly faster time-to-market for … critical deployments, without sacrificing crucial security requirements” [2]

In September 2014, Ericsson acquired a majority stake in Apcera for cloud policy compliance. [3]

Software

The Apcera Cloud Platform is available in two forms: a Community Edition and an Enterprise Edition. The Community Edition is free and can be used for deployment to a single infrastructure. The Enterprise Edition has the functionality to deploy workloads to multiple infrastructures. The Apcera Cloud Platform allows the user to create a set of rules to control available resources at a container level. In addition, it allows a user to connect to back-end services outside of the platform while maintaining governance. It allows users to build a workload once and then move it around in its container without re-writing the code — it only needs the connections made between containers.

Apcera also develops and provides support for several open source software projects, including NATS, a cloud-native enterprise messaging system, Kurma, a container runtime with extensibility and flexibility, and Libretto, a Golang virtual machine provisioning library for public and private clouds.

Major Clients

Some of Apcera’s customers include nextSource, Ericsson, Qualcomm, Cygate, Rodan Fields

Company Timeline

DateEvent
March 4, 2012Derek Collison writes the original code of the Apcera Platform
June 18, 2012Meeting at True Ventures (Official Anniversary of Apcera)
July 13, 2013Series A funding closes
May 14, 2014First orchestrator deployed. Began switching clusters to orchestrator
July 31, 2014Nats.io launch
September 30, 2014Majority stake acquired by Ericsson
April 8, 2015Jeff Thomas joins as Chief Marketing Officer [4]
June 23, 2015Join the open container initiative [5] [6]
December 17, 2015Apcera Joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation [7] [8]
March 24, 2016Apcera‘s Community Edition launched
April 4, 2016Mark Thiele joins as Chief Strategy Officer [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linux Foundation</span> Non-profit technology consortium to develop the Linux operating system

The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit technology consortium founded in 2000 as a merger between Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group to standardize Linux, support its growth, and promote its commercial adoption. Additionally, it hosts and promotes the collaborative development of open source software projects.

Mobile device management (MDM) is the administration of mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablet computers, and laptops. MDM is usually implemented with the use of a third-party product that has management features for particular vendors of mobile devices. Though closely related to Enterprise Mobility Management and Unified Endpoint Management, MDM differs slightly from both: unlike MDM, EMM includes mobile information management, BYOD, mobile application management and mobile content management, whereas UEM provides device management for endpoints like desktops, printers, IoT devices, and wearables as well.

Red Hat Fuse is an open source integration platform based on Apache Camel. It is a distributed integration platform that provides a standardized methodology, infrastructure, and tools to integrate services, microservices, and application components.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloud computing</span> Form of shared Internet-based computing

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a pay-as-you-go model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users.

HP Cloud Service Automation is cloud management software from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) that is used by companies and government agencies to automate the management of cloud-based IT-as-a-service, from order, to provision, and retirement. HP Cloud Service Automation orchestrates the provisioning and deployment of complex IT services such as of databases, middleware, and packaged applications. The software speeds deployment of application-based services across hybrid cloud delivery platforms and traditional IT environments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloud Foundry</span> Open source, multi-cloud application platform as a service

Cloud Foundry is an open source, multi-cloud application platform as a service (PaaS) governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, a 501(c)(6) organization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM cloud computing</span> Cloud Computing

IBM cloud computing is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM. IBM Cloud includes infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offered through public, private and hybrid cloud delivery models, in addition to the components that make up those clouds.

Greenqloud is a cloud computing software company with headquarters in Reykjavik, Iceland, and office in Seattle, Washington, offering cloud computing software and services. Greenqloud develops and sells the cloud and infrastructure management software Qstack for the global market.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenShift</span> Cloud computing software

OpenShift is a family of containerization software products developed by Red Hat. Its flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform — a hybrid cloud platform as a service built around Linux containers orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The family's other products provide this platform through different environments: OKD serves as the community-driven upstream, Several deployment methods are available including self-managed, cloud native under ROSA, ARO and RHOIC on AWS, Azure, and IBM Cloud respectively, OpenShift Online as software as a service, and OpenShift Dedicated as a managed service.

Docker is a set of platform as a service (PaaS) products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. The service has both free and premium tiers. The software that hosts the containers is called Docker Engine. It was first started in 2013 and is developed by Docker, Inc.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube. Alongside a set of management tools, it provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics and machine learning. Registration requires a credit card or bank account details.

Cloud management is the management of cloud computing products and services.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Originally designed by Google, the project is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

A microservice architecture – a variant of the service-oriented architecture structural style – is an architectural pattern that arranges an application as a collection of loosely coupled, fine-grained services, communicating through lightweight protocols. One of its goals is that teams can develop and deploy their services independently of others. This is achieved by the reduction of several dependencies in the code base, allowing for developers to evolve their services with limited restrictions from users, and for additional complexity to be hidden from users. As a consequence, organizations are able to develop software with fast growth and size, as well as use off-the-shelf services more easily. Communication requirements are reduced. These benefits come at a cost to maintaining the decoupling. Interfaces need to be designed carefully and treated as a public API. One technique that is used is having multiple interfaces on the same service, or multiple versions of the same service, so as to not disrupt existing users of the code.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mirantis</span> Cloud computing software and services company

Mirantis Inc. is a Campbell, California, based B2B open source cloud computing software and services company. Its primary container and cloud management products, part of the Mirantis Cloud Native Platform suite of products, are Mirantis Container Cloud and Mirantis Kubernetes Engine. The company focuses on the development and support of container and cloud infrastructure management platforms based on Kubernetes and OpenStack. The company was founded in 1999 by Alex Freedland and Boris Renski. It was one of the founding members of the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September, 2012 to promote OpenStack software and its community. Mirantis has been an active member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation since 2016.

Wercker is a Docker-based continuous delivery platform that helps software developers build and deploy their applications and microservices. Using its command-line interface, developers can create Docker containers on their desktop, automate their build and deploy processes, testing them on their desktop, and then deploy them to various cloud platforms, ranging from Heroku to AWS and Rackspace. The command-line interface to Wercker has been open-sourced.

Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand, taking care of the servers on behalf of their customers. "Serverless" is a misnomer in the sense that servers are still used by cloud service providers to execute code for developers. However, developers of serverless applications are not concerned with capacity planning, configuration, management, maintenance, fault tolerance, or scaling of containers, VMs, or physical servers. Serverless computing does not hold resources in volatile memory; computing is rather done in short bursts with the results persisted to storage. When an app is not in use, there are no computing resources allocated to the app. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application. It can be a form of utility computing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oracle Cloud</span> Cloud computing service

Oracle Cloud is a cloud computing service offered by Oracle Corporation providing servers, storage, network, applications and services through a global network of Oracle Corporation managed data centers. The company allows these services to be provisioned on demand over the Internet.

Cloud native computing is an approach in software development that utilizes cloud computing to "build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds". These technologies such as containers, microservices, serverless functions, cloud native processors and immutable infrastructure, deployed via declarative code are common elements of this architectural style. Cloud native technologies focus on minimizing users' operational burden.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a Linux Foundation project that was founded in 2015 to help advance container technology and align the tech industry around its evolution.

References

  1. "451 Research Recognizes Apcera as a Leader in Emerging Category of Enterprise Container Management and Microservices" . Retrieved 2016-10-04.
  2. Kepes, Ben. "Post The Ericsson Deal, Apcera Rolls Out A Hybrid Cloud Offering". Forbes . Retrieved 2016-10-04.
  3. "Ericsson acquires majority stake in Apcera for cloud policy compliance" . Retrieved 2016-10-04.
  4. "Jeff Thomas Joins Apcera as Chief Marketing Officer" . Retrieved 2016-10-04.
  5. Ghoshal, Abhimanyu (2015-06-23). "Amazon, CoreOS, Docker, Google, Microsoft and others team up to create an open container standard" . Retrieved 2016-10-04.
  6. Wolpe, Toby. "Open Container Project: How cloud giants are joining forces against lock-in and fragmentation | ZDNet". ZDNet. Retrieved 2016-10-04.
  7. "Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces New Members, Begins Accepting Technical Contributions | The Linux Foundation". www.linuxfoundation.org. Retrieved 2016-10-04.
  8. "Why Apcera, Container Solutions, Deis, RX-M LLC and Univa Corporation Joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation | Cloud Native Computing Foundation". cncf.io. Archived from the original on 2016-10-05. Retrieved 2016-10-04.
  9. "Data Center Guru Mark Thiele Makes a Switch, Joins Cloud Startup | Data Center Knowledge". 2016-04-20. Retrieved 2016-10-04.