On-premises software delivery company Replicated Inc. is beefing up security for cloud-native applications with the launch today of a free and open-source image version alert tool called Outdated that helps enterprises ensure they’re running the most up-to-date versions of their container images.

Replicated sells tools that help enterprises run cloud-native apps based on Kubernetes on their on-premises infrastructure. Although most companies are embracing the cloud these days, there are still many apps that need to run inside private data centers, for security and other reasons.

But creating on-premises versions of cloud-native apps is a tough task that involves designing auxiliary components such as installer to set up the app to run on the specific hardware being used. Replicated provides those components in a ready-made form.

The Replicated platform uses Kubernetes, open-source software that’s used to orchestrate large clusters of containers that host the components of cloud-native apps, as the basis of its platform. As such, it’s important that Replicated’s customers are using the latest versions of those container images, it said.

Outdated, it said, is the industry’s first standardized tool that can automatically tell customers when they need to update a container image. Replicated Chief Technology Officer Marc Campbell said the company created the tool to provide an easy and simple way for user to ensure they’re always running the latest version of their apps.

“Instead of just deploying the latest version in a cluster, we determined the best solution is to always pin a specific version so you get reproducible deployments, and then you can decide what you want to do next,” Campbell explained.

Outdated makes things simple for users by listing all of the container images they’re using and color-coding them according to the version type they’re running. So images marked as green are the latest version, yellow means there’s an update pending, and red means the image needs to be updated.

“At a high level, Outdated is a binary that runs on your workstation and interrogates the Kubernetes cluster, finds all the container images that are running with tags, and goes out to the associated container registries and finds the newer versions,” Campbell said.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that while cloud providers have the necessary tools companies need to keep their container images up to speed, those tools don’t exist for on-premises users, and so the management of images can be a challenge. “It’s good to see Replicated is addressing this, offering a useful tool that will help companies find older images that are no longer desired in their on-premises container runtime environments,” he said.

Replicated said it has open-sourced Outdated, and the project is now hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Federation. That should, assuming people find it useful, encourage more contributions to the project and lead to more widespread adoption beyond Replicated’s own customer base.

Image: Replicated