Mirantis Container Cloud Reviews

We use the product for deployment purposes.

The product's most valuable feature is cloud simulation to predict application behavior on the cloud. It helps us with setting images and deploying them without a need to certify applications in the Kubernetes environment. We can work in a cloud-managed environment. It allows us to focus on testing properly.

There could be an automation feature included in the product. It will speed up application processes and will not require scripting codes.

We have been using Docker Enterprise for a year.

I rate the product's stability an eight out of ten. I have never had any stability issues.

The platform's scalability depends on the availability of resources. It is highly scalable if there is enough memory or storage space. A team of four to five executives from the CACD team uses Mirantis Container Cloud in our organization. They support all the deployments conducted by the rest of our engineers.

The initial setup is easy and takes a day to complete. The process involves downloading an executable profile, which is available online, and then executing it on the machine. It requires following guidelines from the CACD team for setting up applications.

I highly recommend Mirantis Container Cloud and rate it an eight out of ten. It is a good starting point for organizations adopting containerization and Kubernetes.

In our team, we need to develop virtualization infrastructure and provide a specific environment for the developer and software engineers to migrate microservices and new applications in an environment based on containers. Therefore, we need to build and create a new platform. We established a container engine called Docker and a distributed open-source orchestrators, such as Kubernetes, to manage lots of containers in the environment.

The organization has a lot of microservices for websites and mobile applications that need to scale easily horizontally and vertically. I am directly responsible for building a Docker environment for the organization for their applications and microservices. Our developers have provided the organization with the benefit of the scalability and availability of the applications. By using Docker Engine and the environment, they can easily run their application in different containers and schedule different hosts. It is simple to scale the applications, check the health and availability.

The most benefits of the containers are resolving the portability of the applications from the developer environment to the production, as well as the ability to scale easily.

This solution is open-source and they need to focus on improving the Linux Operating Systems' GUI. It does not have a GUI making it not user-friendly. Additionally, the containers need to improve security and compliance.

I have been using this solution for approximately two years.

Docker is not stable itself because it is an engine to run containers, and whenever a container is shut down, your data is lost, and you need to restart the containers. However, if you want to receive more stability, you need to use container orchestrators, such as Docker Swarm, or Kubernetes along with Docker. Docker is not perfect itself, you need to use additional software or another orchestration system to make it more stable.

In my company, approximately 10 software engineers and developers are working directly on Docker Engine. In the infrastructure environment, we have two members, myself and another colleague. We build and manage the Docker environment and infrastructure. My main responsibility in my company is providing and developing container solutions, establish and supporting their Docker environment and orchestration systems.

The solution is scalable and we have plans to increase usage in the future.

I learned Docker and Kubernetes myself based on online files, such as educational materials published on the websites and at the Dockers website.

Unfortunately, due to sanctions in my country, we cannot access the official support by searching Google for Kubernetes or the Mirantis company that provided and support Docker. Therefore, we need to solve many problems based on online materials available on the internet. For specific more complex and critical problems, we communicate and negotiate with one of our partners in Europe.

It would be better to provide an online lab for providing Docker environments on the Docker website. This would allow any engineers who are looking to work on a Docker environment access to the environments on the website where they can easily work and manage Docker containers freely on the internet. Additionally, Docker should publish some presentations about new features. For example, they could provide a specific channel for interaction between engineers who are working on the Docker to share their knowledge. The Docker community is not great in comparison with VMware or Microsoft community.

Docker installation is very straightforward because you can easily install Docker Engine based on the instruction provided on the Docker website. It is an easy four or five steps process. 

If you have good knowledge about the installation process, it can be installed in five minutes. However, if you do not have any information about the prerequisites of the installation, it can be difficult. You need to provide lots of prerequisites, such as install services. Without previous knowledge, it could take four or five hours.

I did the implementation of the solution myself. My main responsibility is conducting proof of concept, as well as implementing and helping to develop new solutions for Docker and Kubernetes.

The solution is open-source and free to try.

I rate Mirantis Container Cloud a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is for electronic commerce.

It took us 30% faster to implement the solutions that we used to have with other platforms, and the flexibility has increased by 50%.

The most valuable aspect is the excellent support. In addition, the billing system is really easy to understand.

Sometimes the basic support is a bit difficult if you have a firewall and cloud servers behind the firewall and then try to implement the backup solution, it can be a bit difficult to do by yourself. If you have a Rackspace engineer, it is easier, because they know the procedures, but that service is not cheap. It can be an extra $500 for that extra service, per month. It would be nice to see that cost decrease.

The product is stable. Any problems that we have noticed have been with the customer doing something wrong. For instance, they may have two versions of the application that do not match, which will cause errors. But, we can never blame Rackspace Docker for this. It is an internal problem. 

The scalability is a bit difficult. Rackspace has beautiful tools to make scaling pretty easy. Usually, it is our customer that is afraid to scale too fast. At times, we have to convince our clients to move towards the cloud, because the cloud function is very different from the on premise solutions. Once they understand this, they are eager to jump to the next level. 

We currently have two customers that have 8,000 users connected to the solution. They are in the automotive industry. The users are a combination of sales people, service representatives and executives.  There is a tremendous ability for Docker to support a lot of users.

The customer service is good. 

The setup was very easy, but if you get into something with the backup agent or the API, that is when you may begin to stumble. Sometimes this causes a slower time for implementation and ultimate deployment. 

Our standard procedure is to look at the requirements, set of a pilot, do some testing, and then release the solution. It can take several weeks, and it depends on understanding our customers' needs. We have our own staff who complete the process.

At times, my customers are upset with the cost of the product. Other solutions seems inexpensive, in comparison. But, I tell my customers that once you start putting the solution together, will you realize that it will cost more than Rackspace Docker. 

We looked at VMware and Hyper-V, as well as Amazon. But, we stayed with Rackspace Docker becuas ewe already know that this is doing the best in terms of what it is offering.

My advice is in regards to the security. Many of my customers do not care enough about security, they have a disbelief that once you are in a cloud, you are automatically secure. This sis not the case at all. You need to understand that nothing is guaranteed if you do not follow the right rules. You need proper monitoring tools to keep the work-site safe and secure. It may cost the customer more, but it is worth every penny.

My experience with Docker is in helping to provide solutions for my clients. Specifically, this involves continuous integration and continuous deployment for my clients' workflow.

We are using Docker for a client that we currently have in India. They are building a solution for the medical industry. Docker is very helpful for taking the code from development and applying it to the end user.

The most important thing that my clients focus on is rapid deployment. In this regard, Docker wins hands-down.

It would be very nice to have a GUI that can be used by any administrator, and not just people who have experience with Docker.

The stability of this solution is perfect. Five stars.

This solution scales very well, and it can be scaled to the entire infrastructure when required.

Three of my clients are currently using Docker, and all of them are involved in software development. One of my clients is in the process of scaling up, moving from ten to one hundred and fifty developers within the next six months.

The documentation for this solution is excellent. So far, all of the problems that I have faced have been solved by looking at the documentation.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The setup was very straightforward. I just followed the documentation on the Docker website, and it went smoothly.

Implementation for the client was not very big. It was eight to ten developers, and it took between one and two days to complete. The most important thing on our end was to get our client's infrastructure up and running with Docker.

One person can handle the deployment and maintenance of this solution.

We implement this solution for our clients using our in-house team.

I am using the community edition, rather than the enterprise edition because I am operating on a very small scale at the moment. The community edition does not require a license and is completely free.

We did not evaluate options other than Docker.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to read the documentation very carefully. That can give a lot of relief when the client needs a solution.

If Docker had a graphical user interface then it would be a perfect solution.

I would rate this solution and eight out of ten.

I am using this as a lab costing application. It is pretty fast.

You can easily deploy it in different platforms and cloud providers. You are actually deploying container to container. 

The commissioning is very fast. 

I think this solution needs better security due to rising threats from the outside world. 

The product is stable. 

I am not scaling it very much at this time. I only have about 20 users at present. The roles of the users are information users, managers and middle managers.

The tech support is pretty good. 

It was straightforward for us. 

The pricing and licensing really depends on what your needs are. You could be paying $100 a month to $100,000. It depends on the needs you have from the solution, and the agreement you make.

This solution has cut down on our development time and allows us to spin off new instances for inner development, testing, productions, and security testing.

Areas for improvement are the privacy of container management and the documentation. In the next release, I would like to see best practices on how to manage distributed containers and networks.

I've been using this solution for about five years.

This solution is pretty much stable.

This solution is extremely scalable - we are able to spin off multiple instances very rapidly.

Initial setup was extremely simple and was done in minutes.

I implemented through an in-house team.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature of Docker is by far is creating your own image. By creating your own image, you can have an environment for whatever you are working on that is exactly how you want it.

The idea that you can create a machine this quickly, use it, destroy it if you want, build upon it, take things out, and rebuild very quickly is very useful.

For example, you could add a command that installs a certain tool to your Dockerfile and build that image. Your image now has that tool. If you want to get rid of that tool, you just get rid of the line from the Dockerfile, rebuild the image, and it’s like you never installed that tool.

It gives you a feeling of complete control. By comparison, doing the same thing with something like Vagrant would take a lot of time. With Docker, building an image is so fast that it’s practically disposable.

Docker has allowed me to have pre-defined working environments that can be moved to the cloud and I know they will be exactly the same. Something can be deployed to the cloud, but the overhead of running a virtual machine is wasteful. This is especially the case since on most clouds, an account is already contained by a virtual machine. Running a virtual machine within a virtual machine is possible, but not ideal.

Docker is already aware of how faulty their file system volume mounting technology is on the Mac. I see that they are making improvements in that area, but there is still a long way to go.

On the Mac, Docker is far from perfect. The program has issues communicating with the file system and receiving events. As a result, Docker’s volume features are very slow on the Mac. However, there is a workaround called Docker-sync. Docker sync goes around Docker’s weak volume support on the Mac by syncing files through the network using unison and rsync. Still, I would only give Docker a 10 if their volume experience were as good on the Mac as it is on Linux. I have used this product in a Mac environment as well as Linux.

I have been using Docker since November, 2016. I started using it to see what all the talk was about. The initial learning curve was somewhat steep. What Docker does is simple. However, understanding what Docker does is important and not obvious. That’s why I took Lynda’s course on Docker. This course gave me a good practical understanding of Docker. After understanding the basics, the documentation actually became useful to read.

In my experience, Docker has been very stable.

There have been no scalability issues. As a matter of fact, Docker itself can be used to help you scale up by allowing you to create a new environment quickly when you need more power, or if you want to deliver an instance closer to a customer.

In term of technical support, the Docker community is very helpful and active. There are already a lot of answers to common questions on stack overflow.

I previously used Vagrant. I switched because of Docker’s speed, ease of creating images, and its low overhead.

The initial setup of Docker on the Mac is simple. There is a very friendly GUI installer. If you already have Homebrew installed, you can simply run “brew cask install docker”.

Installing Docker on Linux is a different story, since the versions supported by the default package manager sources are out of date. It’s necessary to follow somewhat lengthy instructions from Docker’s website.

The Docker community edition is free. I don’t have any experience with their paid versions. I have not felt the need to upgrade.

I tried Docker because there was a bit of hype around it. I had been using Vagrant. I did not know about things like LXD before starting to experiment with Docker. If anything, I have learned about alternative container technologies that I might evaluate later.

I think that Docker is the best among its peers. Creating, downloading, uploading, and sharing images is faster than doing the same on something like Vagrant.

When using Docker on the Mac, I only used it to create a local development environment. I also have a Docker installation running in production on a production environment being used as the backend for an iOS app.

I would advise people to take the Lynda course on Docker. In my experience, the documentation only becomes useful after understanding the basics and the general idea.