StackEngine, a container management software startup out of Austin, Texas, is joining the Docker gold rush, having released its core product out of beta on Thursday.
Called Container Application Center, the catch-all service helps enterprise development and operations teams compose, deploy, and automate Docker applications.
Container management is an increasingly crowded space, with big open source projects such as Mesos and Kubernetes joined by a wave of commercial products. Just take a look at this breakdown of all the big players in the Docker ecosystem, which lists more than two dozen orchestration options.
StackEngine’s pitch, in essence, is that it makes running container applications in production environment simple enough for the good old enterprise operations team.
“A lot of tools have flooded the market,” acknowledges StackEngine CEO Bob Qillan. “Kubernetes, Mesos — those tools were built for the microservice data center of the future.” In other words, they’re great if you’re Google or Twitter. But for enterprises, “if you try to containerize legacy applications, Kubernetes and Mesos don’t really allow you to do that,” Quillan adds.
Since its beta release in October, StackEngine has found at least one customer in UberCloud, a cloud service provider targeting academic researchers. The Texas startup has secured at least $1 million in seed funding from Silverton Partners and LiveOak Venture Partners.
Now the company hopes to gain traction with enterprise operations teams under the gun to support containers in production. Many of those teams are looking closely at running containers on bare metal, says Quillan, wiping out the virtual machine layer that sustains comparable services from companies like VMware.
“Containerization is similar, if not bigger,” says Quillan “to the server virtualization transformation that launched VMware 10 years ago.”
