Deploying or managing software applications can be a challenge for many information technology departments across the enterprise who are trying to keep up with the rapid pace of technology. As organizations move business apps to the cloud, usually employing hybrid solutions, they seek quick, reliable and consistent methods of deployment regardless of existing infrastructure.

Container technologies are gaining popularity in cloud markets due to their ability to easily deploy, scale and manage applications with cost efficiency benefits, according to Wayne Watson, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at appLariat Corp. And while software virtualization has helped the process, getting the most out of applications is not as easy as it seems.

“I met with hundreds, if not thousands of customers over the last several years, and one thing kept on resonating … a lot of enterprise software out there is very difficult to deploy. It’s very difficult to get up, and it takes a lot to make it successful,” said Watson, who spoke to Jeff Frick (@jefffrick), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during an interview at theCUBE’s Palo Alto studio. (*Disclosure below.)

Watson has been with startups before; he was part of Integrien Corp., which was acquired by VMware Inc. in 2011. He worked as the director of professional services at VMware for several years and is now part of building a new business, appLariat. In his role at appLariat as CTO, he embraces working with organizations and hearing their feedback on the company’s software.

Helping businesses run apps more efficiently

Over the years, Watson’s work with VMware had him helping enterprise customers deploy applications; however, many of the technologies offered were infrastructure based. Watson wanted to help companies run apps better for businesses to become more successful.

“Then containers started emerging, and the container orchestrators like Kubernetes and Docker Swarm started to show that there are ways to rise higher and start managing the applications,” he said.

The acceleration of containers allowed VMware to add containers to their layer and provided an opportunity for fine-tuning high availability and fault tolerance at the component layer, making services run across and scale up and down more quickly with much more flexibility, Walker explained.  

The genesis of the solution started from the aim of helping customers manage the apps that they have today, as well as any new apps they develop, into a common platform. Watson described how developers now have the capability to spin up apps “so fast” and turn them over to IT with the expectation of running it in production right away. However, he maintained that to assume the app is enterprise ready leaves out so many parts of the deployment process.

“It’s not taking into account security and compliance and all of the other issues that go along with networking controls, load balancing and all of these pieces that have to go with it,” he said. Solutions like appLariat are abstracting many of the issues to make it much more simple and run as an enterprise-grade application, according to Watson.

Standing up containers like Kubernetes (production-grade container orchestration) is not easy, he added, so appLariat is focusing on leveraging the best-of-breed solutions and taking advantage of the orchestrators to make the technology work for the enterprise-grade so it can be an effective tool for businesses.

Watch the complete interview below. (*Disclosure: This segment’s sponsor, appLariat, does not have editorial oversight of content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE