Containers in The Real World
All industry changing trends have an uncomfortable period where the benefit to adoption is understood but real world use is often exaggerated. The way the modern use of containers fundamentally changes the paradigm with which operations folks run their data centers means that the case for adoption needs to be extremely compelling before anyone will move forward.
Also, since change is hard, major industry-shifting trends come with lots of pushback from people who have built a career on the technology that is being changed, disrupted, or even displaced. In the case of containers, there exists a sizeable assembly of naysayers and not shockingly, they generally come from an Operations (and specifically virtualization) background.
To that end, I decided to dig deep into a handful of case studies and interview industry acquaintances about their experiences with containers in production. Making the case that containers can be handy for 2 developers on their laptops is easy; I was curious to find out what happens when companies adopt a container-based data center practice throughout the entire software lifecycle and at substantial scale. Here is what I found.
It’s Getting Better
One of the major challenges many people reported with containerization in the early stages with relation to products like Docker Engine and rkt was that at scale, it was very difficult to manage. Natively, these tools didn’t include any sort of single pane of glass management or higher level orchestration.
As the container paradigm has matured, tools like Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Cloud Foundry have helped adopters make sense of what’s happening across their entire environment and begin to more successfully automate and orchestrate the entire software development lifecycle.
Small Businesses Are Last, As Usual
As with other pivotal data center technologies like server virtualization, small businesses are sometimes least likely to see a valuable return by jumping on the bandwagon. Because of their small data center footprint, they don’t see the dramatic impact to the bottom line that enterprises do when making a change to the way their data center operates. While that’s obviously not always the case, my discussions with colleagues in the field and research into case studies seems to indicate that just like all the big shifts before it, full-steam-ahead containerization is primarily for the data centers of scale, at least for now.
One way this might change in the future is software distribution by manufacturers in a container format. While small businesses might not need to leverage containers to accelerate their software development practice, they may start getting forced into containerizion by the software manufacturers they deal with. Just like many, many ISVs today deliver their offering in an OVA format to be deploy into a virtualized environment, we may begin to see lots of containers delivered as the platform for running a particular software offering.
Containers are Here to Stay
As much as the naysayers and conservative IT veterans speculate about containers being mostly hype, the anecdotal evidence I’ve collected seems to indicate that many organization have indeed seen dramatic improvement in their operations, limited defects, and ultimately seen the impact to their bottom line.
I try to be very careful about buying in to hype, but it doesn’t look like containers are slowing down any time soon. The ecosystem that is developing around the paradigm is quite substantial, and as a part of the overall DevOps methodology trend, I see container-based technologies enabling the overall vision as much as any other sort of technology. It will be interesting to see how the data center landscape looks with regard to containers in 2020; will it be like the difference between virtualization in 2005 and 2015?
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