DevOps is a term that has been discussed at length by IT professionals for several years, with debate persisting on how to implement it most effectively. According to Enterprise Cloud-as-a-Service leader HyperGrid, the rapid and sustained developments in containerisation technology can be instrumental in helping IT teams to fully embrace the DevOps philosophy.
Containers have very much come to the forefront of the developer community over the past couple of years. At the DockerCon conference earlier this year, it was revealed that there were 460,000 applications using Docker worldwide, representing a 3,100 per cent growth over the past two years. For Kelly Murphy, founder and CTO at HyperGrid, this sharp increase in popularity is a clear indicator of their benefits and future potential, but there are still some issues to be resolved if its promise is to be completely fulfilled.
Murphy said: “It’s easy to see why containers have made such headway. Containers offer a degree of control and efficiency that system adminstrators have not had before. The move to virtualisation was a step in the right direction, but there were still issues with that particular technology, as running hundreds of virtual machines in a cloud workload is extremely resource-hungry.
“Containerisation does away with some of these issues, by ensuring that businesses are deploying virtualisation, whilst encapsulating applications in containers means that they are no longer running a complete operating system. This enables more efficient use of resources and faster spin-up times, which are essential for unleashing DevOps.
“Alongside this, containers can be of great assistance when businesses are moving legacy applications to the cloud, as they mobilise applications and allow them to operate cross-platform, which eliminates a major compatibility headache for CIOs. However, despite the massive increase in container usage, there are still problems that need to be overcome.”
According to Murphy, these lingering issues revolve largely around finding people with the right skills to manage the move to containers, a lack of automation and management tools for containerisation, and possible security challenges. To solve these problems, he believes that IT teams need to focus on adopting containerisation solutions that offer comprehensive, user-friendly orchestration capabilities to make the process considerably less fraught with difficulty.
He added: “Without adequate automation tools in place, companies can only benefit from the advantages of containers after they’ve performed lots of manual provisioning. Having these tools in place removes this labour-intensive component of containerisation, by enabling IT staff to deploy containers quickly and effectively, and without the need to learn a plethora of new skills. In addition, a comprehensive containerisation management solution incorporates watertight security features, meaning CIOs are released from managing the security of their own deployments.”
He concluded: “In the future, the Internet of Things is going to reshape businesses in much the same way that it is starting to shape consumers’ lives. As more IoT implementations get rolled out, containerisation will be key in making each individual deployment easier to handle, and freeing up time and resources to focus on implementing DevOps. For this to be a success, containerisation solutions need to have ease of use and flexibility at heart, so IT teams can turn their attention towards innovation and collaboration.”
