Two New Products From DCHQ Raise the Ante in Container Application Deployment and Management Street Fight
Seattle, Washington (PRWEB) August 17, 2015 -- LINUXCON and CONTAINERCON — In less than six months, San Francisco startup DCHQ Inc. has moved from company and product launch to user acquisition, a partnership with Red Hat and sponsorship of the Linux Foundation. Today, the company continues that pace with a new, hosted version of its product and version 2.0 of its on-prem product. The fast-moving startup has upped the ante for players in the container application management game.
DCHQ is a startup building software for enterprises using Docker in application modeling, deployment and lifecycle management.
Its first product, DCHQ On-Premise, launched this spring and quickly gained several dozen users. Today, the company updates DCHQ On-Premise to version 2.0, and it also has released to general availability a hosted version of the product to compete with offerings such as Heroku, but for downstream DEV and TEST environments.
The Product Suite
DCHQ, now available in both hosted as well as on-prem versions, is a deployment automation solution that combines Docker agility with app lifecycle management, policy and governance controls. It gives infrastructure operators the controls they need while still giving app developers the agility they want when moving from dev/test to production model.
The software manages backups, auto scaling and monitoring. A commercially licensed solution with enterprise grade support, DCHQ On-Premise runs on containers and may be installed on-premise on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu or CentOS via shell script or automated deployment from DCHQ Hosted PaaS. DCHQ registers a variety of Docker repositories, including Red Hat Container Registry, Docker Hub and Quay.
New Capabilities in DCHQ On-Premise 2.0
Launched in April of this year, DCHQ On-Premise gains a powerful new set of enterprise-focused capabilities, including:
- End Point Registry // Register end-points across popular cloud platforms, including OpenStack, DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer, HP Public Cloud, CloudSigma and ElasticHosts.
- Auto-scale Policies // Set auto-scale policies to automatically provision new VM capacity.
- Docker Compose // Leverage the Docker Compose format for deployment and updating application post-provisioning while keeping track of all changes made to the application. Change the cluster size, status and other parameters of your deployed Docker Compose application by updating the Docker Compose file.
- Affinity Groups // Deploy applications across multiple hosts using affinity groups leveraging an integration with Weave; deploy web server and database containers on different hosts to comply with affinity rules.
- Hybrid Support // Accelerate application development by allowing users to deploy their application server on a local machine while the rest of the app components may be deployed on a shared data-center.
- Dockerfiles in GITHUB // Automate creation of new Docker images using Dockerfiles in GitHub; deploy multi-tier applications with the latest images.
- Continuous Delivery with Jenkins // Register multiple Jenkins instances and update running applications with the latest builds from Jenkins.
Read more about DCHQ On-Premise 2.0 at the DCHQ product site.
A Cost-Effective Alternative to Heroku
DCHQ also announced today the launch of DCHQ Hosted PaaS. It gives public cloud users a new option, ideally suited for development teams that want to automate the deployment and life-cycle management tasks associated with application containers while reducing the cost of replicating applications in DEV/TEST environments.
“The benefits of DCHQ Hosted PaaS are obvious: use almost any public cloud provider and get a full-featured PaaS experience for downstream DEV and TEST environments without the high cost of Heroku,” said Amjad Afanah, founder and CEO of DCHQ. “With the launch of DCHQ Hosted PaaS, we’re the only hosted PaaS that offers live-container updating and support for the most popular public cloud services.”
Benefits of DCHQ Hosted PaaS
Unlike many public PaaS offerings, DCHQ Hosted PaaS allows development teams to use cloud providers they're already using, including DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer and Google Compute Engine. Using an agent-based architecture, DCHQ Hosted PaaS automates the provisioning and auto-scaling of virtual infrastructure used for Docker-based application deployments.
The solution offers intuitive and extensible application modeling as well as templates for Java, Ruby, Python and PHP developers to quickly stand up complex application stacks.
Integrations with GitHub facilitate continuous delivery via supported Docker repositories like Docker Hub, Quay and Red Hat Container Registry. Users can automate the provisioning of updated application stacks at a scheduled frequency or whenever a code commit is made.
Update Running Containers
Application developers can update running containers in DCHQ Hosted PaaS by automating the continuous build deployment through an out-of-box integration with Jenkins. Or, they can achieve the same outcome by executing bash-script plug-ins in the running containers at a defined frequency or on-demand. With multi-host deployments, developers can provision part of an application stack on his/her local machine while the other components can be hosted on a registered cloud provider, thus freeing up the local compute resources.
After an application is provisioned, day-2 operations like backup, scale in/out, log analysis, and application updates allow developers to speed up application development without accessing the underlying host. Developers can monitor the performance of running containers and the underlying hosts in order to correlate issues to application changes or build deployments. Notifications and alerts warn when a host or container is down or when the CPU/memory utilization of either the host or the running container is above a defined threshold.
Learn more about DCHQ Hosted PaaS at the DCHQ product site.
Free Offer for New Users
The first 100 new users to sign up for DCHQ Hosted PaaS enterprise account will receive a dedicated server with 8GB of memory, free of charge for three months. No credit card is required to take advantage of this offer.
Founder Quote
“Since launching DCHQ On-Prem this spring, we’ve moved very fast to add features and expand our product lineup. With today’s launch, DCHQ is giving developers and infrastructure operators the most advanced, easy to use set of container application lifecycle management tools available.”
—Amjad Afanah, founder and CEO of DCHQ
Quotes From Supporters and Users
"DCHQ has made rapid progress in a short period of time. With their on-prem product in v2, and their hosted product in GA, they’re showing what an agile, focused group of engineers can accomplish, especially when those engineers have the ear of their target market. We see a huge opportunity for tools that help enterprises embrace containers and manage the application lifecycle. DCHQ's team comes with deep knowledge of the enterprise customer and has developed a compelling set of tools for enterprise CIOs looking to take advantage of containers."
—Parker Thompson, partner, 500 Startups
"We’re working with DCHQ because their approach to container management solves the specific app lifecycle management challenges we face. We rely on Docker, and we need a platform that enforces policies without slowing our developers down as they iterate new versions of our software. The DCHQ team is impressive, because they’re moving as fast as we are, making a good product better."
—Anders Fredriksson, founder, ProLeads.io
About DCHQ, Inc
DCHQ, Inc. is a startup building software for enterprises using Docker in application deployment and lifecycle management. The company was founded by MIT graduate Amjad Afanah, who formerly managed application automation offerings for VMware and cloud management solutions for Oracle. The company was launched in 2015 as a part of the 500 Startups accelerator program in San Francisco. More at http://www.DCHQ.co and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/dchqinc.
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Robert Cathey, Cathey Communications for DCHQ, +1 865-386-6118, [email protected]
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