VMware has announced the release of their NSX virtual networking software which aims to manage network environments of cloud-native and container-based applications. This move, they explained, is an aspiration on the part of a network vendor to evolve from a traditional data and campus network environment to an increasingly mature cloud environment with sophisticated automation tools.
Explaining their evolution, VMware said that last year they had announced a version named NSX-T which ran in public and private cloud environments. Their latest version of the NSX-T 2.1, they say, supports Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry platform as a service – a container-based application-development platform.
According to Brad Casemore, research director at IDC Data Center Networking, the market for container management platforms is broad with players like Cisco and Juniper rolling out containers and container management systems to resolve networking issues.
Laying emphasis on this line of thought, Casemore further added that:
It’s not just about the network architecture and topology supporting container run times. Operationally there’s an even greater impetus for more extensive automation. If you’ve got an environment that’s that vibrant, that subject to change, with processes starting up and ending, processed in a distributed micro-services environment, you can’t be doing things manually.
Industry watchers say that container adoption is at a nascent stage but market trends show that there is a quick adoption policy by companies. As per the 2016 Voice of the Enterprise survey by 451 research, only 25% respondents used containers and of that only 34 % described their usage of the technology as broad. Industry experts believe that these numbers will change soon as companies realize the pain points of managing their network requirements.