This blog post is a bit of a confession.

Last week, I attended Red Hat Summit to watch one of Leostream’s customers talk about how they leverage NVIDIA GPUs in virtualized deployments with Red Hat’s infrastructure portfolio. (The session wasn’t recorded, but you can download the slides.)

Leostream may not appear in the session title, but I was thrilled to hear what our customer had to say about our platform (hint, see slide 30).  While attending their talk was the highlight of my time at Red Hat Summit, it was during conversations with other attendees and Red Hat employees when I had an epiphany.

You see, at Leostream, we often have internal conversations about our strategy for containers. Does it make sense to add container support into our Connection Broker? What would that look like? What platform would we start with?

Well, as often happens, our customers figure out how to leverage the open flexibility of our platform in ways we never imagined. They already defined our container strategy as something we support right now! It’s all about remote access.

A container is just another IT asset

The key point I heard everyone make is that Leostream is the end-user access portal for everything. It doesn’t matter what operating system it is – Windows, Linux, or macOS – or where it’s hosted – public cloud, OpenStack, on-premises virtualization, hosted hardware, or in a container – just put a Leostream Agent on it and you can manage user access via Leostream.

Period.

You can use our Leostream Gateway to provide SSH access. You can leverage any of a number of high-performance display protocols if you have graphics-intense applications. You can pool and share resources. You have audit-level tracking of who’s using what, from where and when. And, you can ensure that the right user always has access to the IT assets they need to get their job one, no matter where that user roams.

Those IT assets can be containers, desktops, or server sessions.  It really makes no difference to Leostream.

The other side of the Leostream coin

The flip side of Leostream’s remote access capabilities is our feature to manage the capacity of IT assets in your environment. The Leostream platform integrates with public clouds and virtualization platforms in a way that allows us to create and delete virtual machines when you need them.

Here’s my confession: I got caught up in the need to provide this level of IT asset management for containers as part of Leostream’s container strategy. But, for containers, our provisioning capability isn’t needed. You have an arsenal of other tools at your fingertips, such as Red Hat OpenShift, that automate creating and managing your container infrastructure.

What you don’t have is an end-user access portal for those containers after they exist. Thankfully, that’s Leostream’s company mission – to be the premier platform for providing remote access to hosted IT assets: for anyone, from anywhere, to anything. Even to containers!

Go ahead! Add Containers to your Hosted IT Asset Strategy

I’m crossing “container strategy” off Leostream’s to do list and letting my Development team off the hook! With Leostream, you have everything you need, right now, to offer containers to your users alongside the other hosted IT assets in your data center or in the cloud.

Want to learn more? Drop us a line and we’re happy to chat.