Rancher Labs has announced its open-source container-management software is out of beta and generally available. Rancher 1.0 aims to accelerate all aspects of the software development pipeline, from writing and testing code, to running complex microservice-based applications.

Features include the ability to select from multiple container orchestration frameworks like Docker Swarm and Kubernetes; a cloud-agnostic infrastructure service layer; load balancing and persistent storage services; and the ability to work across cloud and datacenter boundaries.

“Since announcing our beta product less than a year ago, Rancher Labs has experienced incredible demand, as well as received encouraging and helpful feedback and community support for this open platform, which has enabled us to make meaningful enhancements to Rancher,” said Sheng Liang, CEO of Rancher Labs. “Now, with well over a million downloads, Rancher has quickly become the platform of choice for teams serious about running containers in production.”

Quali open-sources plug-in
Quali announced today that it is open-sourcing its plug-ins known as Shells, and making them available through a newly formed developer community.

Quali is a Cloud Sandbox platform for DevOps automation. Along with creating the developer community, Quali is providing product features to empower it, including Python libraries and extended APIs, which will make it easier for developers to create and share new Shells and Sandbox orchestration workflows.

The Cloud Sandbox platform enables development, test, support, partner and sales groups to deliver results and transform the IT infrastructure into purpose-built clouds, designed for DevOps.

“Quali’s extensive Sandbox APIs enable us to make sandboxes part of a fully automated DevOps workflow,” said Moorthy Raju, staff engineer at VMware. “This is critical to our vision of a fully automated, self-service interoperability lab/data center shared by our virtualization and engineering groups.”

The following components are available in the developer community:

  • Open-source Quali’s Shell modules under the Apache 2.0 license
  • Native support for Python-based shell automation and sandbox workflows
  • A full set of northbound Python APIs and libraries for integration with DevOps and application life-cycle tools
  • A Developer’s Center website with a registry of all available open-source shells, as well as tools for developers such as tutorials, best practices, samples and videos

New functionality by BlazeMeter gives developers more freedom
BlazeMeter has added new functionality, giving developers the ability to run any combination of Gatling, the Grinder, JMeter, Locust and Selenium tests in parallel through a single unified control language, both locally and in the cloud. Developers can now leverage existing Java Python and Scala language skills, and run any combination of test in parallel.

BlazeMeter’s new technology allows teams to create load and performance tests as brief fragments of code in any text editor, removing many of the barriers presented by legacy tools, according to the company. BlazeMeter tests can be defined using YAML or JSON file formats, and then managed in version control alongside the applications being tested.

The company’s “performance tests as code” format is a domain-specific language that controls test logic and performance thresholds for open-source tools without the need for expertise in the tools themselves. This gives developers or testers greater reach with the tools they already use. Individual small-scoped tests can be run in a targeted fashion or composed along with other tests into sophisticated real-world scenarios at runtime, according to the company.

The full announcement is available here.