Runecast Analyzer & HPE Ezmeral Container Platform

You probably know by now that containers are a hot topic. Organizations are adopting containers more broadly for their business needs, moving from testing the waters with small-scale Proof Of Concepts (PoCs) to broader deployments. We see a real mix of workload styles: some are plain ‘lift & shift’ (also known as rehosting), some are refactored apps, and some are brand new cloud-native apps. While we see this growth in containerized workloads, it is likely that for most there will be a significant period of co-existence with more traditional applications.

The Speed of New Vulnerabilities

While IT Operations teams have a great amount of experience when it comes to managing Windows, Linux, storage, networking, firewalls, and virtual machines, modern applications demand a whole new set of skills. While techs are upskilling as they go, nobody has 20 years of experience in Kubernetes (and if they tell you that they do… you should probably terminate the interview right there and then). At the same time, best practices are evolving all the time for even the most mature software – in the fast-moving world of Kubernetes things are moving much quicker. Just because things were deployed in line with the best practices 6 months ago, doesn’t mean that they’re in line with the current thinking. Beyond best practices, security is a major concern that we hear regularly when talking to customers, especially when you focus on containerized workloads.

HPE Ezmeral Monitoring/Alerting

HPE Ezmeral Container Platform provides a core set of monitoring and alerting capabilities using a combination of Metricbeat data collector, Elasticsearch for search and analytics, and Kibana for dashboard displays. This provides IT Ops teams with the kind of metrics that they’re used to using when monitoring traditional applications.

“With organizations increasingly dependent on HPE Ezmeral for its capabilities in the containers space, it made sense for Runecast to join forces and help forge a formidable solution for IT teams,” said Aylin Sali, CTO & CoFounder of Runecast. “Runecast Analyzer serves to bring insights to emerging technologies, making sure that security compliance and stability of mission-critical IT ops does not suffer with the adoption of new trends.”

Runecast Analyzer Automated Audits

Runecast Analyzer complements these built-in metrics with analysis of best practices and security compliance checks not only for container-based workloads, but also for workloads running on more traditional platforms like VMware’s vSphere, vSAN, NSX, Horizon, and VMware Cloud Director. At the same time, these same capabilities are available for AWS and Microsoft Azure – all from a single interface.

At launch, Runecast Analyzer provides continuous analysis of the infrastructure supporting your workloads – the above mentioned best practices (as detailed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the maintainer of the Kubernetes open-source project), and also security compliance checks against the latest benchmark from the Center for Internet Security (CIS). CIS has long been the go-to organization when it comes to frameworks to improve your security posture, providing coverage for many technologies including Kubernetes, vSphere, AWS, Azure, and more. Runecast Analyzer provides full coverage for the entire CIS Benchmark for Kubernetes, with 71 individual cross-referenced checks against your entire Kubernetes environments, highlighting the where, why, and how to improve your security posture.

Together, We Win

Runecast Analyzer provides IT organizations with a common tool for monitoring VMs, cloud and HPE Ezmeral Container Platform applications. Having a common tool minimizes the learning curve for IT Operations teams in adopting Kubernetes and helps IT administrators deploy and manage VMs, containers, and cloud environments at scale and with confidence.

You can find Runecast Analyzer on the HPE Ezmeral Marketplace and deploy natively to Ezmeral Container Platform.