Cumulus Networks is introducing a suite of technologies to help enterprises to deploy and operate production-ready web-scale networks for containers and microservices.
The company said its new “Cumulus Host Pack” enables a path to web-scale networking that supports containers and microservices by utilizing a common toolset of the Linux ecosystem. Because Cumulus Linux brings the host to the network, Host Pack gives application developers and network operators universal visibility and connectivity of the network. This visibility is needed because containers are constantly created and destroyed, and workloads are often moved to different physical machines or migrated to completely different data centers. The new Host Pack offering is the first of its kind to address the challenges network operators face in achieving end-to-end network visibility and connectivity of containerized applications.
Key capabilities and benefits of Host Pack include
- Granular container visibility for faster debugging: Host Pack gives operational and development teams shared visibility of application availability through popular container orchestration tools such as Mesosphere, Kubernetes, and Docker Swarm. Enabled by NetQ running on the host, network operators can easily view the health of container services, keep track of container locations, track IP addresses and open ports, and have deep insights into where an issue resides, allowing for faster troubleshooting.
- Simplified network connectivity for improved performance: With the use of routing protocols such as FRRouting and BGP unnumbered directly on the host and in a Layer 3 architecture, Cumulus’ network fabric is able to dynamically learn about containers and distribute these addresses throughout the network to ensure predictable performance between containers across host environments. This removes the complications of a Layer 2 overhead, provides rich and reliable multipathing, simplifies IP address management, and increases reliability.
- A common data center operating model, Linux, from network to containers: Cumulus Linux utilizes the same Linux networking model that is foundational to container systems. This enables the use of a common operational toolset, guarantees interoperability, and reduces complexity across the entire data center.
The Cumulus Host Pack suite will also be made available for trial through Cumulus in the Cloud, a low effort, zero cost way to explore these technologies before committing to a full deployment.
“As companies look at containers as a way of deploying revenue generating applications in faster, more agile ways, the supporting networking infrastructure needs to adapt and change,” said Josh Leslie, CEO, Cumulus Networks. “Until now, we’ve been missing a solution that gives customers a scalable end-to-end network architecture and pervasive view of how containers impact the network. Cumulus Host Pack allows customers to deliver on the promise of containers and microservices by removing operational barriers and enabling them to design a network of web-scale efficiency that is reliable, and simple to deploy.”