Our growing team here at Slim.AI is hard at work now building out the Slim Developer Platform, a set of tools and interfaces built for developers and teams working on cloud-native applications.
With the DockerSlim open source project as a basis, we’re building a set of dev tools that makes it easier to find, analyze, author, and optimize containers. Right now, we’re engineering integrations with most major cloud registries, creating a true multi-cloud starting point for DevOps professionals and their development teams.
Over time, we’ll connect every stage of the developer experience for containers — from the first desktop pull to command line tools for authoring images and building images to automated optimizations in the CI/CD pipeline and even reporting, monitoring, and debugging capabilities.
This integrated system of dev tools will, we hope, take the pain out of modern day container management. Initially, our platform will consist of three main components:
Sample UI from our Web Portal closed beta
The most visible of our new products will be a web-based portal that developers can use to search, browse, analyze, visualize, troubleshoot, and manage containers they may be interested in using. We’ll present graphical UIs to examine layers, files, build instructions, and security concerns for containers in all major registries — even private ones.
The container experts at Slim will curate collections, provide tips and tricks for container usage, and help guide new developers in the container authoring journey. We’ll develop compelling, easy-to-follow tutorials that show beginners and experts alike how to manage and optimize their containers and become experts at cloud-native development.
The portal will serve as a jumping off point for DevOps to create collections of containers for their teams to use on a regular basis, and create a collaboration space for container management. Longer-term, we’ll build auditing and reporting tools that integrate into developer workflows and empower the community to make smart choices about their containers.
Command Line Interface in DockerSlim X-ray interface
As excited as we are about the web portal and its ease of use, we build and run our containers in the command line, just like everyone else. We’re looking to enhance the tool-chain created by the DockerSlim community for use on the developer’s local machine. Already, DockerSlim has a powerful command-line UX. With the Slim Developer Portal, we’ll add functionality from our SaaS platform including container management, enhanced visibility, and more robust CI/CD operations to the existing optimization and build functionality.
We view our CLI toolset as the daily driver for DevOps teams containerizing their workflows, and something those leaders can provide their application teams to accelerate feature creation without a lot of specialized knowledge required.
Swagger API from the Slim Developer Portal
Here at Slim.AI, we build everything with an API-first philosophy. We view our API — — and the clear and concise documentation that goes with it — as a way to support and engage our community, allowing developers to build integrations that guide our product roadmap. Our API will be open to the public and is fully documented in Swagger.
We view this as a foundational element to allow organizations and teams to send containers to and from the Slim Developer Platform, where their containers can be managed, analyzed, automatically optimized, and tracked through the CI/CD pipeline.
Our API will allow DevX teams to automatically tune containers for development, testing, and production, and ship those containers to on-demand environments on the cloud platform of their choice. Already, DevOps practitioners leverage DockerSlim in test pipelines, and our API will make it easier than ever to operationalize customized pipelines at scale.
