Mirantis Acquires amazee.io to Bring NoOps to K8s
Mirantis today announced it has acquired amazee.io to advance adoption of a “ZeroOps” approach to deploying applications in Kubernetes environments.
Amazee.io’s open source Lagoon platform provides a layer of abstraction that analyzes how an application is constructed using containers on a local desktop or in a Git repository. Lagoon then automatically invokes the application programming interfaces (APIs) required to deploy that application on a Kubernetes cluster.
Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel says the acquisition of amazee.io will allow Mirantis to advance a ZeroOps approach that enables developers to build and deploy applications without the intervention of a DevOps team.
The Lagoon platform can be deployed either by an application development team or invoked as a managed service that is monitored on their behalf after deploying agent software on a Kubernetes cluster.
Michael Schmid, CTO for amazee.io, says in either scenario Lagoon eliminates the barriers to building cloud-native applications by eliminating the need for developers to know anything about the deployment environment. Instead of having to become so-called full-stack developers and master infrastructure APIs, Schmid says Lagoon enables developers to focus their time and energy on writing application code.
The application created can then be automatically deployed on any distribution of Kubernetes, he added. Lagoon is also integrated with tools such as Helm, Prometheus, Grafana and others to enable developers to add additional capabilities when required, notes Schmid.
The acquisition of amazee.io extends the Mirantis application development portfolio that also includes Lens, an integrated development environment for building container applications used by more than 450,000 developers, and a backend platform for deploying those applications based on the Docker Enterprise platform the company acquired from Docker, Inc. Mirantis also acquired Kontena, a provider of a Kubernetes distribution, and gained life cyle management tools that have been integrated with Mirantis Kubernetes Engine and Mirantis Container Runtime.
It’s not clear to what degree developers have been intimidated by Kubernetes, but the overall percentage of developers building cloud-native applications is still relatively small compared to the total number of developers building enterprise applications. While the number of developers building applications using containers is well north of ten million, the total number of developers building enterprise applications exceeds 40 million. Various application development platform providers have been investing in frameworks that provide higher levels of abstraction to try to make it easier to build and deploy applications.
However, Schmid said most of those platforms are being created by engineers with DevOps backgrounds rather than being designed for developers. By acquiring amazee.io, Mirantis will enable those developers to build and deploy more cloud-native applications faster via a ZeroOps approach that automates the management of the backend platform.
Automation, of course, has always been at the core of any DevOps initiative. The issue that organizations are struggling with now is the degree to which DevOps platforms themselves may have become a bottleneck to building applications by not going far enough when automating the application development process.
