The European network and cloud services provider Interoute has integrated Rancher Labs’ container management platform, called Rancher, with its Global Cloud Infrastructure platform.
Interoute customers can now run containers in Interoute Virtual Data Center (VDC) in any of the company’s 17 cloud zones. Interoute’s network is most heavily concentrated in Europe, but it girdles the globe with installations in Asia and North America.
Interoute is currently supporting Docker containers and orchestration systems. Customers can use Rancher to manage Docker to create scalable application delivery platforms, globally, within secure networks and with guaranteed separation. Interoute warrants that the service is “all automated, all elastic, with free data transfer.”
Rancher is an open source software platform that enables organizations to run containers in production. Rancher-the-company says the infrastructure services included in Rancher-the-product include networking, storage, load balancing, DNS, and security. These are typically deployed as containers themselves, so that the same Rancher infrastructure service can run on any Linux hosts from any cloud, the company says.
Rancher uses a container orchestration system to manage the hosts. It has its own implementation, Cattle, but it also offers Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos. Cattle was originally an extension of Docker Swarm, but implementations of Cattle and Swarm began to diverge enough that Rancher decided to support them separately.
The use of containers can help enterprises build and deploy software applications with greater agility, quicker deployment times, and lower operational costs. But the approach is still relatively new, and the tools and techniques are still being developed. Tools like Rancher are designed to make it simple to deploy and manage containers in production, especially compared to having to build them from scratch.
In a statement, Interoute CTO Matthew Finnie said “Enterprises developing and building apps in the cloud, and those on a path to digital transformation need digital ICT infrastructure that allows them to build, test, and deploy faster than ever before. The integration of Rancher software with Interoute Digital Platform gives developers access to a managed container platform that sits on a global privately networked cloud, enabling true distributed computing.”
Interoute is offering free trials of its VDC, including the container capabilities on its website. In VDC, customers pay only for compute and storage resources consumed, and there are no charges for network setups or data traffic over networks.