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Cloud Field Day 2 Preview: Nirmata

July 20th, 2017

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Nirmata is a new Tech Field Day presenter and a company that I haven’t heard of before. Nirmata means architect in Indo-Aryan languages and its mission is to “enable enterprises to innovate faster, by transforming how software is deployed and operated.”

It seems Nirmata has been running for just short of 4 years and founded by a team who are interested in using DevOps to fully automate the management of applications across clouds. Co-founder Jim Bugwadia came from Cisco and isn’t just the hand waving inspirational, strategy management type but likes to still keep his developer hands busy saying he codes in Go, Java, and Javascript. Other co-founders: Damien Toledo was from NetScout and Ritesh Patel was from Brocade.

Nirmata runs a cloud service to fully automate the management of containerised applications across public and private clouds as well as connected devices. I’m not sure what the connected devices refers to though.

Enterprise are adopting more and more DevOps as well as deploying new applications in containers. They are also wanting to potentially V2C (VM to Container, the new version of P2V, physical to virtual) existing applications to take advantage of some container functionality such as a standardised packaging format and simpler deploys. Nirmata says it can plumb seamlessly into a CI/CD pipeline and give enterprises the security segregation and auditing they need.

There is built in service discovery and what seems could be a sort of API gateway which they call a service gateway. This seems a little more advanced than just network routing to get requests to the right containers, keen to understand more.

As Enterprises start joining the wave of containerisation, VM sprawl seems a distant memory, container sprawl is orders of magnitude more complex. Mixing cloud native application containers which are built for microservices with your other containers into which monolithic applications have been shoe horned makes for a challenge.

Nirmata is priced per managed memory, free up to 20Gb, for 3 users and environments and a single public cloud provider. You can then pay $4/GB month for unlimited memory, 10 users, 8 environments, 2 public clouds + some support. Then there’s the enterprise edition for a negotiable price for unlimited users/environments, unlimited clouds and 24/7 support.

My question is, why would you chose to go with Nirmata. Docker Enterprise Edition is simple container management built for Docker although you still manage it yourself. Kubernetes is container management at scale, being adopted by most clouds. You can either run it yourself or ask someone like Platform9 to run it for you.

What I can see as extremely useful is a managed app catalogue for the enterprise. Managing containers is partly interesting but being able to deploy applications at scale across multiple clouds is what enterprises are actually interested in. Sure, they may run on containers underneath which need orchestration and management smarts but its the apps that are important rather than the infrastructure.

Looking forward to hearing more about Nirmata.

Gestalt IT is paying for travel, accommodation and things to eat to attend Cloud Field Day but isn’t paying a penny for me to write anything good or bad about anyone.

Categories: CFD2, Tech Field Day Tags: , ,
  1. July 20th, 2017 at 18:15 | #1

    Julian, thanks for the insightful write-up. Totally agree application management is where it’s at. Looking forward to meeting and showing you what we have built at Nirmata!

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