Interoute used this week's Cloud Expo event at the Excel in London to make a pretty big announcement in the form of a managed container platform that blends together its own infrastructure platform with that of Rancher Lab's open source container management platform.
The new, combined platform will help organisations get more from existing investments and further support digital transformation initiatives, according to Interoute.
Containers have made it much easier for businesses, particularly larger enteprises, to be much more agile when it comes to creating, testing and implementing new applications and software. This removes traditional barriers and switches the focus to where the most value can be created – that of writing the app and deploying the code – using the container rather than worrying about the other cloud infrastructure building blocks.
"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," said Matthew Finnie, Interoute's CTO.
Digital transformation is necessary for organisations to ensure their continued health in the future, but transformation of this nature isn't necessarily as easy in reality as it is in theory for the majority.
"Most customers we're talking to have problems of the here and now and have this futures problem too," Finnie told Cloud Pro. "Most customers are trying – not always – to do both in parallel. [When it comes to digital transformation], you've got to want it to happen and expect it's going to be bumpy."
Once the code has been deployed into the container, the container is then deployed across the Interoute cloud infrastructure. Thanks to the Rancher Labs software integration, businesses can deploy those containers in any of Interoute's 17 cloud zones around the globe.
Louise Westoby, vice president of marketing at Rancher Labs, added: "We’re thrilled to partner with Interoute and provide users of the Interoute Enterprise Digital Platform with a complete and turn-key container management platform. We look forward to seeing those users accelerate all aspects of their software development pipeline, from writing and testing code to running complex microservices-based applications."
