October 2015 Summaries

The Container Ecosystem Project, initiated by Sysdig, aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the diverse technologies within the evolving container and microservices ecosystem. This initiative categorizes various technologies from foundational core container technologies to fully developed container platforms and support tools, offering descriptions and examples of each. It distinguishes between open-source and commercial solutions, with specific columns for Docker and CoreOS, two leading open-source contributors. The project is designed as a living document that encourages community contributions for updates and improvements, facilitating easier navigation and understanding of the container landscape for both newcomers and seasoned experts. The goal is to present a clear, organized survey of the core technologies in the container ecosystem, helping users grasp the microservices stack and explore further with provided keywords and additional resources.

Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, discusses the evolving landscape of container technology, highlighting the importance of the Open Container Initiative (OCI) in establishing a shared standard for containers. He emphasizes the necessity for multiple container runtime implementations to ensure compatibility and success, mentioning CoreOS's work on rkt and its security enhancements. Polvi addresses common misconceptions about containers, such as their incompatibility with legacy applications, and stresses the need for monitoring, visibility, and education to facilitate container adoption in production environments. CoreOS's commercial Kubernetes platform, Tectonic, aims to deliver Google-style infrastructure capabilities to businesses, providing a pre-assembled, enterprise-ready distribution of open-source tools. As container adoption grows, CoreOS focuses on improving security and consistency across development, cloud, and data center environments, with these areas expected to be significant trends heading into 2016 and beyond.

In a guest blog post by sysdig community member Donatas Abraitis, two new features added to the sysdig tool are highlighted: a csysdig view for monitoring socket queues and a sysdig chisel named memcachelog for visualizing memcache activity. The csysdig view helps users monitor server backlog, allowing them to optimize server configurations in real-time by observing queue occupation and identifying potential bottlenecks, which is particularly useful for managing server capacity and handling unresponsive services due to high connection attempts. Meanwhile, the memcachelog chisel provides insights into memcached operations, helping users monitor object sizes and handle SERVER_ERROR messages when object size limits are exceeded. These additions showcase sysdig's extensibility and encourage users to create custom functionalities using its APIs for enhanced monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities.

Sysdig Cloud has introduced a comprehensive monitoring solution for Amazon's EC2 Container Service (ECS), addressing the challenges of complexity and limited visibility inherent in containerized microservice environments. This new solution leverages Sysdig's ContainerVision technology to provide deep insights into both infrastructure and application layers without requiring container instrumentation. By extracting metadata from Docker and ECS, Sysdig Cloud can map the logical structure of microservice applications, offering both physical and logical views that facilitate resource management and performance analysis. The tool enables operators to monitor, alert, and visualize ECS-based applications effectively, enhancing capacity planning and troubleshooting capabilities. This development supports organizations transitioning to ECS, allowing them to deploy production applications with greater confidence and efficiency.

AWS re:Invent, the leading cloud computing event, is set to take place from October 6-9 at The Venetian in Las Vegas, attracting more than 15,000 participants worldwide, including developers, operations, and IT business decision-makers. With over 250 sessions planned, the event will cover topics such as cloud architecture, continuous deployment, performance, security, and migration. Sysdig, the sponsor for the second consecutive year, invites attendees to visit Booth #1339 for demos of Sysdig Cloud, a container-native monitoring solution providing deep application-level visibility without additional configuration. This innovative tool is geared towards enhancing container environments by delivering comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting capabilities, with a promise of unparalleled container visibility.