Galactic Fog
Future-Proofing Applications

Galactic Fog is a company that provides a cloud-native management platform that helps organizations move from legacy systems to cloud models using both containers-as-a-service (CaaS) and functions-as-a-service (FaaS) technologies. The company delivers various capabilities to application developers with its Gestalt framework by building functionalities without the need to manage the container environment. The framework consists of an infrastructure layer with a pluggable interface for various container engines as well as a FaaS engine called Laser.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Anthony Skipper, Founder & CTO and Daniel Lizio-Katzen, CEO of Galactic Fog share their insights on the company’s journey of assisting organizations with the construction of future-proof, cloud-native applications.

Over the years, Galactic Fog has witnessed several changes in the container management industry. How has Galactic Fog aligned itself with the changing requirements of its clients?

The industry has been witnessing the need for applications and software that can run in any environment, without any hassle. Galactic Fog addresses this need and offers serverless implementations for container engines such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or Amazon’s Kubernetes to help companies manage their services across both the public and private clouds.

Strongly believing in the importance of implementation services, Galactic Fog has formed an infrastructure layer that enables them to offer implementation services to container engines such as Kubernetes, DC/OS and Docker Swarm.

Large enterprises generally opt for a single portal with maximum security which can control all data. Considering this requirement for large regulated enterprises, Galactic Fog offers implementation services for several sections via a single platform, Gestalt.

Gestalt is Galactic Fog’s turnkey solution to manage container environments and provide serverless capabilities. What are the unique features of this platform?

Gestalt is a flexible platform that can be easily plugged into container engines like DC/OS, Kubernetes or Swarm to federate and govern container content and applications. Gestalt’s Policy Engine allows the clients to control every aspect of container deployment and usage.

Constructed on top of their lambda engine, Laser, Galactic Fog’s policy engine allows its clients to customize their policies using the programming runtime of their choice. The Gestalt platform also offers first class support for SDN and storage technologies such as Project Calico and EMC’s Rex-Ray. Gestalt helps build serverless and container native applications for any virtualized environment. The built-in lambda engine enables Galactic Fog’s clients to customize their migration based on their organizational processes.

Galactic Fog is indeed an interesting and uncommon name. Please walk us through the idea behind naming the company ‘Galactic Fog’?

Being a provider management infrastructure that operates in any compute environment, from the cloud to the edge, the company wanted to emphasize on the word ‘fog’. To present their universal approach perfectly, ‘galactic’ seemed to be the most suitable word. The company develops solutions, that help teams build, run, and manage cloud-native apps.

Galactic Fog has revolutionized the container management industry with its capabilities. Can you throw some light on the company’s unique offerings?

Galactic Fog offers agile solutions where the client’s developers can keep using the native tools and CLIs from their favorite products, using the company’s API emulation layer. “Companies can use our portal, our CLI or our API’s to perform any kind of deployment that they need in terms of container management cases,” says Daniel Lizio-Katzen, CEO, Galactic Fog. The company’s single platform for management and integration makes it easier for enterprises to manage their applications and SDLC; enabling them to future-proof applications and infrastructure.

Moreover, apart from the abstraction layer, which is a part of their container-as-a-service (CaaS) offering, the company has built a function-as-a-service (FaaS) engine called Laser which is used to implement the company’s capabilities as a cloud-native management platform. The FaaS engine can be used by organizations looking to convert legacy applications to running cloud natively on with a function based architecture. Galactic Fog works with a number of large banks and other enterprises to use Laser to perform data analysis across their transaction and data streams to generate advanced analytics.

To ensure security in the process, Gestalt ensures that no container or function is exposed over the internet unless it complies with a companies policies and is auditable. Moreover, Galactic Fog’s lambda engine Laser supports most popular programming languages.

Galactic Fog offers consultation service to organizations that are just starting on their first container and serverless implementations. The difficulty mainly lies in the initial implementation, which the company eliminates with its framework.

What is Galactic Fog’s roadmap for the near future?

At present, the company primarily serves a North American and European client base, which primarily consists of large enterprises. In the near future, it has plans to expand to the Asia Pacific market. With an expert team of engineers who hold extensive experience in the financial industry, the company plans to continue to focus on the financial services space while moving into other heavily regulated industries. Anthony Skipper, Founder & CTO, Galactic Fog adds, “We see the adoption of function-as-a-service accelerating among large enterprises and we want to provide them with most secure and performant platform possible.”