antsle
Fostering an Era of Edge-based Container Management

Through an innovative hardware and software stack, California-based antsle has been redefining the approach to virtualization and containerization. Bernie Blume, the CEO and founder, and Johannes Dietzel, analyst and co-founder, talk about how antsle democratizes access to containerization technologies. The duo explains how antsle is well positioned in the technology revolution toward a decentralized cloud architecture embracing edge computing, as they get into details about some of the most significant pain points existing in centralized cloud infrastructures and how they turn out to be a steep mountain to climb for smaller enterprises.

How does antsle drive innovation in container management?

antsle is creating a movement as an alternative to AWS and other public clouds with a private cloud environment. With the antsle box comes a nimble fanless server—one-fourth the size of a traditional server— backed by robust antsleOS and antMan container and VM management tools. The prominent cloud providers today only cater to core management at an application level using tools like docker and kubernetes. Building the infrastructure has to be solved separately. With antsle, container technology is built-in on the infrastructure level as well, using LXC. This is what makes running 100+ antlets (VPSs) on a single antsle possible in the first place.

How does antsle’s edge-centric solution stack redefine development and testing?

Edge computing is going to be the new norm as the nature of internet technologies shifts from a centralized model to a decentralized one. Customers will just have to purchase the antsle box and then can get up and running in a matter of minutes. They also get an intuitive dashboard that is even easier than AWS to create virtual instances. Each instance can be virtualized or containerized. One could literally take a lunch-break while a snapshot is being created on AWS, for example, but with antsle, snapshots are rendered immediately. We have also built in a number of redundancy features to ensure data protection, such as error correcting RAM and mirroring on SSDs. With antsle, companies can reduce huge overheads on their IT departments.

What are some of the pain points associated with relying on public cloud virtual instance hosting

For most startups we engage with, their monthly AWS bills are several thousands of dollars.

For the same price, a company can get two or three antsles. Besides, there are actually no monthly fees with us. And most clients see a visible ROI in just one-three months.

The second pain point is compliance; where there are just too many security guidelines. Every developer or tester just gets their own instance on AWS, as their personal playground. It is tough for the IT department to enforce all those security rules. All of those public cloud instances are not behind the corporate firewall; they are just somewhere in some data center.

Also, container management solutions tend to be targeted at huge enterprises alone. With the existing complexities associated with them, companies will be required to handle multi-month projects by employing lots of skilled people in order to get them deployed. With antsle, we solve that pain point brilliantly by making it a lot easier. All they would have to do is plug in the antsle, visit myantsle.local on the browser, and your VPS is deployed within ten seconds. We have preset default settings for every instance although they are completely customizable.

Besides, achieving containerization on public clouds requires going the ‘extra mile’ from a virtual machine given the fact that they are OS-level VMs. antsle eliminates this burden by allowing to have both virtualized and containerized instances in parallel and independently.

Taking about the happy clientele, could you elaborate on a few customer success stories?

One of our clients is a leading retail chain in the U.S. They’ve had skyrocketing AWS bills as they had thousands of dev/test instances. They were also looking for private cloud solutions for compliance and security reasons. antsle’s being fanless was a perfect fit and had all the retailer’s instances safe behind their firewall. Developers could test, take snapshots, and re-test in a jiffy.

By using antsle, a large network provider was able to monitor their client’s network by placing an antsle in each of their data centers. They were even able to embed a ‘dial-home’ feature on the antsles for their clients.

A data analytics company, with a mix of Windows and Linux instances, reported 80 percent cost advantage, in total ownership after taking everything into account.

Having had impressive recognition in a short span of time, how do you envision the roadmap for antsle?

Placing antsle as a key ingredient in hybrid cloud environments is a feature recently introduced. Scaling outside the local cluster is possible and will be made more and more automatic with our next releases. This takes away any worries of scalability. By providing auto-scaling using APIs of well-known players such as AWS, we can just scale out to the public cloud. We are going to release antsleOS under the name of edgeLinux to be installed anywhere for a broader user base, not just on antsle hardware. We are also all set to foray into the European markets.