In this discussion with Alex Heneveld of Cloudsoft, we talk about what it really means to automate and manage an application, and how it necessarily builds on visibility into the application and the ability to orchestrate related services. Heneveld discusses the origin of Apache Brooklyn and the basis for ideas about autonomic computing for managing complex systems. Heneveld mentions how he sees containers as similar to past movements involved in multi-threading, parallel execution, and chain processing—and while containers aren’t exactly the same, the idea of easy encapsulation and speed is there. Heneveld goes on to cover a great deal of topics including the idea of “death as architecture,” the role of messengers in the container stack, modeling policies, and container networking capabilities.

Alex Heneveld is the Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer of Cloudsoft. Alex brings 20 years experience designing software solutions in the enterprise, startup, and academic sectors.

Most recently, Alex was with Enigmatec Corporation where he led the development of what is now the Monterey Middleware Platform. Previous to that, he founded PocketWatch Systems, commercializing results from his doctoral research. Alex holds a PhD (Informatics) and an MSc (Cognitive Science) from the University of Edinburgh and an AB (Mathematics) from Princeton University. Alex was both a USA Today Academic All-Star and a Marshall Scholar.