StackEngine

Last updated February 23, 2019

StackEngine was founded in Austin, Texas in 2014 to build enterprise-grade container management and automation products to help organizations simply deploy, manage, and scale resilient applications. It was designed as a Docker management software product to provide an integrated DevOps solution for end-to-end container application delivery and operations. StackEngine was acquired by Oracle in December 2015.

Automation is the technology by which a process or procedure is performed with minimum human assistance. Automation or automatic control is the use of various control systems for operating equipment such as machinery, processes in factories, boilers and heat treating ovens, switching on telephone networks, steering and stabilization of ships, aircraft and other applications and vehicles with minimal or reduced human intervention. Some processes have been completely automated.

Docker is a computer program that performs operating-system-level virtualization, also known as "containerization". It was first released in 2013 and is developed by Docker, Inc.

DevOps is a set of software development practices that combines software development (Dev) with information technology operations (Ops) to shorten the systems development life cycle while delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently in close alignment with business objectives.

History

StackEngine was founded in May 2014 by Eric Anderson, Robert Gordon, and Bob Quillin.^[1] As an early mover in the Docker management marketplace, StackEngine built enterprise-grade container management and automation products that helped organizations simply deploy, manage, and scale resilient applications. Silverton Partners and Live Oak Venture Partners both led the StackEngine seed investment and Series A rounds.^[2] The company launched out of stealth October 2014 to focus on products to address Docker operations.^[3]

Product

The StackEngine model-based Docker management software provided an integrated DevOps solution for end-to-end container application delivery and operation, all with an integrated GUI dashboard, service discovery, scheduling, and orchestration functions. StackEngine could be deployed into any on-premises, hybrid, public, or private cloud environments and scaled across thousands of hosts enabling users to start in the lab and scale out to full production.

StackEngine launched the Container Application Center in June 2016 to eliminate the Docker operations bottleneck by helping ops teams (1) bootstrap Docker into production; (2) discover, visualize, and orchestrate small to large scale Docker deployments; and (3) intelligently automate change and configuration management for containers.

StackEngine focused on automation as the answer. Containerization instantly shifted the problem up the stack away from low-level system configuration tools to application-level container management tools. With StackEngine, the product was designed to help deliver product faster, deploy more frequently, operate more reliably, and run wherever was most optimal.

Oracle Acquisition

On December 18, 2015, Oracle signed and closed an agreement to acquire StackEngine.^[4]^[5] All StackEngine employees joined Oracle as part of Oracle Cloud. Oracle announced the Oracle Container Cloud Service – based on the StackEngine technology and built by the StackEngine team – at Oracle OpenWorld 2016.^[6]

Related Research Articles

NetApp, Inc. is a hybrid cloud data services and data management company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It has ranked in the Fortune 500 since 2012. Founded in 1992 with an IPO in 1995, NetApp offers hybrid cloud data services for management of applications and data across cloud and on-premises environments.

Database administration is the function of managing and maintaining database management systems (DBMS) software. Mainstream DBMS software such as Oracle, IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server need ongoing management. As such, corporations that use DBMS software often hire specialized information technology personnel called Database Administrators or DBAs.

Univa is a privately held software company that develops workload management products to manage applications, services and containers. Univa's software-defined computing infrastructure and workload orchestration solutions enable companies to scale computer resources across on-premises, cloud computing, and hybrid systems. The company is based in Chicago, with offices in Canada and Germany.

Release management is the process of managing, planning, scheduling and controlling a software build through different stages and environments; including testing and deploying software releases.

OpenStack is a free and open-source software platform for cloud computing, mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), whereby virtual servers and other resources are made available to customers. The software platform consists of interrelated components that control diverse, multi-vendor hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center. Users either manage it through a web-based dashboard, through command-line tools, or through RESTful web services.

Tufin is a security policy management company specializing in the automation of security policy changes across hybrid platforms while improving security and compliance. The Tufin Orchestration Suite supports next-generation firewalls, network layer firewalls, routers, network switches, load balancers, web proxies, private and public cloud platforms and microservices.

Chef is an American corporation headquartered in Seattle, Washington, which produces software allowing information technology departments to automate the process in which they configure, deploy and scale servers and applications.

OpenShift is a family of containerization software developed by Red Hat. Its flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform—an on-premises platform as a service built around Docker 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, OpenShift Online is the platform offered as software as a service, Openshift Dedicated is the platform offered as a managed service, and OpenShift.io is an application development environment for the platform available online.

Rational Automation Framework is a computer software product in the increasingly important Application release automation category, providing automation for middleware installation, middleware management, middleware operations, and application deployment.

Puppet is a privately held information technology (IT) automation software company based in Portland, Oregon.

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

Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. The IT infrastructure managed by this comprises both physical equipment such as bare-metal servers as well as virtual machines and associated configuration resources. The definitions may be in a version control system. It can use either scripts or declarative definitions, rather than manual processes, but the term is more often used to promote declarative approaches.

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.

A DevOps toolchain is a set or combination of tools that aid in the delivery, development, and management of applications throughout the systems development life cycle, as coordinated by an organisation that uses DevOps practices.

Avi Networks is a company that provides software for the delivery of enterprise applications in data centers and clouds. Application services provided by Avi Networks include local and global load balancing, application acceleration, security, application visibility, performance monitoring, service discovery, and container networking services. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and has R&D, support, engineering, and sales offices in Europe and Asia.

Continuous configuration automation (CCA) is the methodology or process of automating the deployment and configuration of settings and software for both physical and virtual data center equipment.

Buddy is a web-based and self-hosted continuous integration and delivery software for Git developers that can be used to build, test and deploy web sites and applications with code from GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab. It employs Docker containers with pre-installed languages and frameworks for builds, alongside DevOps, monitoring and notification actions.

StackStorm is an OpenSource event-driven platform for runbook automation. It supports the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach to DevOps automation and has been compared with SaltStack and Ansible, it primarily focuses on doing things or running workflows based on events. StackStorm is comparable to IFTTT or Zapier in providing a way to connect many different services together in coherent applets or workflows that begin based on defined events or triggers.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[1] "StackEngine, a startup with Docker monitoring tech, launches with $1M".

[2] "StackEngine Launches out of Stealth to Manage & Automate Docker, Raises $1M - Business Wire".

[3] Miller, Ron. "StackEngine Emerges From Stealth, Adds Operational Layer To Docker".

[4] "Oracle and StackEngine".

[5] Yegulalp, Serdar. "3 reasons why Oracle bought StackEngine".

[6] "Oracle Transforms the Cloud Infrastructure Market".