HTBASE is pooling compute, storage, and networking into composable infrastructure based on containers that can work across an organization's private data centers and multiple public clouds.

“We build software,” said Erwin Daria, a pre-sales systems engineer with HTBASE. “We don’t sell appliances. There’s no hardware that a customer has to buy. It’s meant specifically for organizations that are looking to build applications using containers but also want to consume cloud services.”

The company was founded in 2015. The product — named JUKE — is targeted at DevOps teams within organizations that want to use container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes and Docker Swarm. Compared to the regular IT team, the DevOps engineers need more agile infrastructure. “We want to service those DevOps engineers and allow them to be flexible,” said Daria.

In addition to providing a pool of composable resources within a company’s private data center, JUKE can work seamlessly with the three main public cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Aline Stukart, a marketing analyst at HTBASE, said the company has a formal partnership with Google and informal partnerships with AWS and Azure. She said the company first focused its technology on composable infrastructure but then expanded to include an emphasis on multi-cloud.

There are several reasons for that. For one, developers need the flexibility to run workloads wherever they’re most cost efficient. Or “maybe they have an initiative to build onsite for regulatory purposes but they may need to burst into cloud faster than IT can scale,” said Daria. “Second, you want to dev-test internally with the ability to break things, but once you move to perfection it allows you to migrate all that work to the cloud," he said.

The JUKE software is available as an appliance in each of the three public cloud providers. Users can add cloud resources with API calls into each of those platforms.

Daria said one of the most unique capabilities of JUKE is its software-defined storage. “The primary problem we solve is persistent data in containers,” he said. “It’s difficult. There are not a lot of great solutions that create persistent volume for containers that migrate.” JUKE uses the direct storage technology from each public cloud provider, stitches it back into its pool of resources, and then layers its own file system on top of it.

“The pièce de résistance for us is that our software-defined networking allows us to take resources from clouds and data centers and make it look like it’s fitting into a single data center, all on the same Layer 2,” said Daria. JUKE meshes on-prem and public cloud nodes together using SDN. The resulting network fabric allows Layer 2 connectivity to span multiple clouds, binding all nodes with local IP addresses.

He said HTBASE’s closest competitor would be Mesosphere’s data center operating system (DC/OS) combined with Portworx’s cloud-native storage.

JUKE is currently available, and the company is also offering a free trial version limited to four nodes: two in the private data center and two from a public cloud.