ISSUE 167: VMware Buys Bitnami

“Compiler optimization work makes only marginal contributions.”

The choice of cloud native development tools and platform options have grown exponentially during the past couple of years. But with such a wide range of choices comes uncertainty, and sadly, confusion in many cases when deciding which option represents the best fit for software production pipelines.

Chris Aniszczyk, chief technology officer of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and vice president of developer relations at the Linux Foundation, recently described the state of affairs in the cloud native landscape where there are “at least 20 to 30 tools out there, and it’s constantly growing, with a mix of startups and cloud providers," as “an opportune time amongst vendors and users to bring sanity to this space.”

Much of this “sanity” involves the availability of common standards for continuous delivery (CD). To this end, the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) was created to foster collaboration for deployments using Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker and Tekton.

During this podcast episode of The New Stack @ Scale series, Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, discussed the CD Foundation's mission and what the development community can expect. The podcast discussions recorded at the Open Source Leadership Summit also covered hopes, as well as concerns, about what such a foundation might represent.

VMware Buys Bitnami

It has been a ride to watch the waves flow in the developer tool space and witness what startups come out from the rumble of the seas, upright, sailing with the wind. Case in point: Bitnami, which was purchased by virtualization giant VMware, for an undisclosed sum.
 
Bitnami was one of our initial sponsors and we’ve long admired its open source leadership, application marketplace development and packaging of components to run on multiple cloud services. Bitnami has a modular, pipeline approach, which allows organizations to deploy applications to multiple cloud services. It also offers customers the ability to package, deploy and manage their own application architectures across multiple cloud services.
 
It is a good move for VMware as well, which continues to define its approach to an open services model. The acquisition gives VMware an opportunity to build upon its own marketplace so it may deploy applications and package components to run across multiple cloud services. The Bitnami team deserves applause for making the transition to container-oriented architectures and using DevOps practices to gain more capabilities. The next steps will be to take its approach to VMware for running workloads on fast, sophisticated and distributed architectures and extending the reach for customers to run applications and packaged components on multiple clouds, or in-house.

Intel Releases Cloud Hypervisor Based on Same Components as Amazon’s Firecracker

Intel launched a new special-purpose Linux hypervisor for cloud native workloads built on the Rust virtual machine manager, or rust-vmm — the open source set of hypervisor components that Amazon’s Firecracker micro virtual machine is built on. The rust-vmm project is a collection of components from which cloud providers can assemble their own special-purpose hypervisors. Amazon, for example, can use the components to run FaaS in VMs with its own open source Firecracker project.

Removing the heavy, desktop and server-oriented emulation components of Linux, roughly 80% of the original QEMU code, cuts the virtual machine boot time significantly. The result is VMs that behave more like containers.

New Relic One Offers an Enterprise-Wide View

New Relic has unveiled the first aspect of its platform for the future, a connecting layer over its existing monitoring and visibilities offerings, which enables enterprises to see everything in one place. Its platform going forward is building on its recent acquisitions of SignifAI and Kubernetes specialist CoScale.