Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you may have noticed that there has been a lot of talk about Docker and container technology as it relates to the cloud and maximizing resources. What does all this talk mean for the average enterprise? This technology is experiencing explosive growth, but for whom?
Leaders of the open source project understand that in order for containers to work for more enterprise companies, there needs to be a “standard” container that works across more traditional vendors like VMware, Cisco, and across new public cloud platforms like AWS. This is a work in progress at the moment.
The big news for the enterprise, especially in a market that is becoming increasingly skittish about vendor lock-in, this technology removes hurdles to moving your applications where you want them…across internal clouds operated by multiple vendors or across testing and production environments.
One of the main reasons IT organizations are adopting container technology is to build out a hybrid cloud environment. Containers help to eliminate interoperability concerns that can become an issue with a hybrid deployment. Apps that run well in test environments built in a public cloud will run exactly the same in production environments in on-premises clouds. The caveat: Setting up containers in a hybrid environment is not “easy”, this is a specialized skill. Most enterprises will either have to hire several engineers to implement container technology or outsource, possibly to a Managed Service Provider with expertise in this area.
There have been some security concerns around container technology, however over the next few months best practices and security protocols around containers will become more standardized. As they do, more and more enterprises will be able to benefit from the use of containers when deploying a virtual environment.
In the meantime, we put together an infographic with some basic facts about containers, including:
- The difference between VMs and containers
- The benefits of using containers
- The timeline of container technology
- Enterprise companies and Cloud Service Providers that use containers
