Tredly - Containers for Unit

Tredly was developed as two main products that worked together. Container virtualisation in FreeBSD using its jails technology and a nodeJS web interface with an API connecting to the container virtualisation. We used other technologies like Python and bash. We created a fully virtualised and firewalled network stack within FreeBSD to deal with security.

We built Tredly because we were building Vuid. Vuid was a large, fully extensible, globally scalable, ERP system written in nodeJS. It was designed to allow large startups and medium businesses and business units to scale extremely quickly while having up to the minute insights across their entire business. We developed Vuid in response to and to capitalise on the knowledge we gained when one of Reddog Technology's customers went from 12 staff to over 1,000 across multiple countries in 18 months.

This was early days of containerisation of servers. Docker released their production version in October 2014. We started developing Tredly in February 2013 when we started developing Vuid.

We needed containerisation to run Vuid, we needed something with rock solid networking and even more importantly a rock solid file system with inbuilt redundancy and scalability across multiple data centres and countries. This didn't leave us much choice, at the time FreeBSD was the only reliable operating system using the ZFS file system in a production capacity. We set about creating containerised virtualisation on FreeBSD.

Tredly was incredible. When we pushed a change to the Vuid code, Tredly would download the changes from our build servers, bring up new containers with the code changes (Vuid ran on 48 separate but integrated containerised servers), connect them to the existing infrastructure and they would be running live. The change took less than a few seconds. It allowed our developers to create code and add features at an incredible rate without impacting any of our customers.

We decided to make Tredly an open source product. We wanted other developers who wanted to use FreeBSD containerisation to benefit from the work we had done. We released Tredly on Github - https://github.com/tredly