The Companies That Support Linux: DCHQ

DCHQ is a governance, deployment automation, and lifecycle management platform for container-based applications. The company offers out-of-the-box integrations with private and public cloud platforms, which lets development teams automate the provisioning and scaling of virtual infrastructure they’re already using.

DCHQ recently joined The Linux Foundation as a new member. In this profile, Amjad Afanah, founder of DCHQ, tells us more about the company and their open source strategy, including why they joined The Linux Foundation and how they are innovating with Linux and open source.

Can you describe DCHQ.io’s business for us?

DCHQ delivers enterprise discipline to container app lifecycle management. It combines Docker agility with advanced application modeling, lifecycle management, policy and governance controls. Available in hosted and on-premise versions, DCHQ gives infrastructure operators the controls and end-to-end automation they need while still giving app developers the agility they want when moving from dev/test to production model.

DCHQ provides an advanced application modeling framework. It ships standard with enhancements to Docker Compose like cross-image environment variable bindings, extensible BASH script plug-ins that can be invoked at request time or post-provision, application clustering for high availability across multiple hosts or regions and auto scaling. It facilitates application deployments on Linux hosts running on-premise or in the public cloud using an agent-based architecture. This supports advancement placement, containers/hosts/clusters monitoring, application backups, continuous delivery, container updates and out-of-box alerts/notifications. DCHQ automates the provisioning and auto-scaling of virtual infrastructure on 12 different cloud providers and frameworks. The current list includes OpenStack, CloudStack, DigitalOcean, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, Rackspace, HP Public Cloud, and IBM SoftLayer. Lastly, our product eliminates “Shadow IT” by enabling granular access controls to data-centers, application templates, builds, plug-ins and Docker repositories (including Docker Hub, Quay, and Red Hat Registry).

Why is open source important to the company? How and why do you use open source and/or Linux?

While DCHQ is commercially licensed software with enterprise-grade support, the company has embraced and contributes to open-source technologies in the Docker ecosystem, including the Open Container Initiative. DCHQ On-Premise runs on Docker containers and may be installed on-premise on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu or CentOS. It installs 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. It also integrates with Weave for cross-container communication across different hosts.

What is the company’s open source strategy?

DCHQ will continue to embrace and integrate with complementary open-source technologies. In the near future, the company plans to open source parts of the platform to get the support of the DCHQ community and continue to improve its services. 

Why is Docker a core part of your strategy? Why is Docker important?

Our platform today focuses on providing end-to-end automation for Docker-based applications. As more Linux Container technologies become popular, DCHQ plans to be container-agnostic and support other emerging container technologies.

What do you see as the biggest benefit of collaborative development?

The benefits are obvious as on-boarding the help of a development community can always take the platform further — especially as technologies and application frameworks evolve.

Why did you join the Linux Foundation?

We believe in the foundation’s mission and are keen on ensuring the growth of Linux as our platform ultimately depends on a stable and continuously improving Linux.

What interesting or innovative trends are you witnessing and what role does Linux or open source play in them?

The growing adoption of Linux Containers for continuous integration and delivery is the ultimate example of how open-source initiatives can transform development processes and accelerate application development. Our company is now focused on simplifying the containerization of enterprise applications and providing the infrastructure management, governance controls and application life-cycle management needed to fully unleash the power of Linux Containers.

What other open source or collaborative projects do you participate in and why?

We have just started contributing to various Apache projects, and in the near future, our contribution to Docker and other Linux projects will grow.

Anything else important or upcoming that you’d like to share?

The explosive growth and interest in containers needs support from companies that understand enterprise technology consumption models. That’s what DCHQ was founded to deliver for app modeling and lifecycle management.