The shift towards containerized applications is causing major strategic changes even for vendors that have been early to recognize the demand for portability and fast release cycles that is driving the trend. The latest example is CliQr Technologies Inc., which debuted a new iteration of its flagship hybrid cloud management platform this morning that aims to address some of the main challenges standing in the way of the movement.

CloudCenter 4.0 extends the capabilities of the built-in topology designer used for putting together applications to heterogeneous environments that combine several different kinds of services and containers. Such deployments often have upwards of thousands, or in the case of web giants like Google Inc., billions of interdependent instances that simply can’t be orchestrated effectively by hand.

The same complexity also makes manual management impractical in other areas, which the new release tackles with a tag-based governance system that allows operators to centrally enforce policies based on considerations such as location and security. For example, a healthcare provider might use the functionality to automatically prevent a container marked as holding regulated patient data from leaving its home jurisdiction.

That’s one of many uses CliQr sees for the feature, which is complemented by access controls that provide administrators with the ability to add another layer of security on top of the automated policy enforcement in the form of limitations on who can access what. Permissions can be tailored on an individual as well as group basis to strike the optimal balance between security and convenience.

That focus on customization carries over to the administrative dashboard itself too, which CliQr says has been reworked with a focus on task to improve productivity. To that end, the update also adds a slew of automation features designed to simplify application deployment and resource provisioning across different environments.

Photo via CliQr