Applications have become the lifeblood for businesses to generate revenue and stay competitive. It is not surprising that organizations are adopting an app-centric approach in their data centers and clouds. Microservices architectures enable continuous development and delivery, scaling, and isolation through independent services. While microservices applications offer several advantages compared to monolithic or even n-tier applications, appliance-based ADCs are not cost effective or in most cases, even viable to support the vast amount of east-west interactions between the services and provide no visibility to the application components. Developers need two common requirements: (a) they need flexibility and programmability to develop, test and deploy their apps quickly (b) they need visibility into application interactions and performance to pinpoint services that are at fault or to troubleshoot an application outage.
Web-scale organizations, such as Google, Facebook, and other cloud giants embrace open source technologies. Their internal IT efforts are dedicated to building custom modules from these open source solutions. However, most enterprises do not have the resources to commit a dedicated IT team for open source projects. So, what is an optimal strategy that bridges the challenges (of deploying, supporting, and maintaining) and benefits (flexibility and programmability) of open source technologies? Avi Networks and Mesosphere have partnered to offer such an optimal solution for enterprises considering container-based microservices applications. Refer to my blog post from last week on understanding the pitfalls of assembling application services from multiple point solutions.
DC/OS
DC/OS (Data Center Operating System) delivers large-scale container clusters with central orchestration and control across data center or cloud environments and treats them as a single, shared set of resources. DC/OS simplifies the management of distributed systems made of app servers, databases, and caches. It provides elastic scalability to build, deploy and manage container and microservices architectures. DC/OS automates the manual process of deploying, updating and maintaining applications, making it easy for enterprises to deploy production-ready clusters and improves time-to-market for new applications. It is one of the first platforms to bring together the orchestration services for Mesos that many developers find that they would otherwise have to spend time implementing themselves.
Avi Vantage Platform: Integration with DC/OS
With DC/OS, the operating system just became the entire data center – a complementary expansion in the purview of application services is offered by the Avi Vantage Platform. Built entirely on software-defined principles, the Avi Vantage Platform mirrors next generation data center and cloud architectures to deliver the flexibility and simplicity expected by developers and IT administrators. Avi Vantage separates the data plane (application services including load balancing) and control plane (management of distributed application service components) to provide application services in both on-premises and cloud environments. For microservices applications, Avi Vantage works with the DC/OS to deliver a comprehensive Container Services Fabric – a full suite of granular application services for distributed applications. These services include service discovery to identify all services that make up an application, L4 – L7 security services including firewalling, micro-segmentation, URL filtering, and DDoS protection, service visibility and performance monitoring, and predictive autoscaling of services across thousands of nodes. The platform constantly adapts to all of the changes that are typical in dynamic environments managed by DC/OS with services or containers spinning up or down and applications being updated or migrated. Avi Vantage enables administrators to automate operations and empowers developers with programmable self-service for application services. It also includes role-based access to enable developers to view the entire application, its service interactions, and its performance from a single dashboard.
The software-defined application services architecture of the Avi Vantage Platform integrated with the fluid model of computing made possible by DC/OS makes it simple for enterprises to deploy production-ready microservices applications. Our common vision with Mesosphere makes us proud to be a partner with Mesosphere.
Deploying Production-Ready Applications
Organizations use a variety of container-based microservice applications, from the web to big data to IoT applications, on DC/OS because it supports a variety of frameworks and applications. Deploying these applications in a PoC environment is usually an easier part of a project. Crossing the chasm from PoC to production, especially in large enterprises, requires cloud platforms to have enterprise-grade features such as high availability, scale, security (AAA and network-based), broad application support, and application lifecycle management. DC/OS provides that complete cluster management solution based on a battle-hardened version of Apache Mesos®.
Avi Vantage delivers a perfect complement to complete the stack with L4-L7 services for large scale production deployments. Avi Vantage enables production-ready applications to be deployed in a DC/OS cluster with turnkey application services such as service discovery, load balancing, autoscale, application visibility/analytics and application security including microsegmentation, mitigation of volumetric attacks, etc.
DC/OS and Avi Vantage: A Complete Solution
The combination of DC/OS and Avi Vantage offers an out-of-the-box solution for enterprises that are moving towards an application-centric model. In addition to enabling enterprises with production-ready application services, DC/OS and Avi Vantage deliver enterprise-grade flexibility, programmability, and security.
DC/OS:
Support for services and frameworks to run alongside your applications in a DC/OS cluster including:
Spark
Cassandra
Kafka
Hadoop
Web Applications
Security via user authentication
Basic load balancing and autoscaling capabilities for app servers
Avi Vantage:
Full-featured distributed load balancing for both within the cluster and from outside the cluster
Central point of control and management for all services
Automatic IP address management for Virtual IPs
Service discovery for both frontend and backend applications
Application map
Microsegmentation for security and isolation
Predictive autoscaling, driven by machine learning
Deep insights, visibility and analytics for application services
Layer 7 security including DDoS detection/mitigation, security analytics, WAF, etc.
Avi Vantage + DC/OS: Getting Started with Microservices and Containers Just Got Easy
Here are a few tips to help you deploy production-ready, DC/OS cluster in minutes:
Download Avi for public cloud environment (Avi Vantage is free for dev/test environments and for startups with less than 100 employees)
Use the CloudFormation template to get started with Avi for DC/OS cluster
Avi and DC/OS bring this to you at no cost for dev/test environments and make it as easy as 1, 2, 3:
Download and install Avi
Configure Avi Controller with Mesos/Marathon
Update Marathon apps with avi_proxy configuration
You now have a fully functional cluster in 10 minutes!
