HPE Expert Says That Containers Will Streamline IT Processes

It’s a new decade—and it’s certainly starting out as a whopper. As Robert Christianson, Chief Cloud Strategist at HPE points out in this article, there are seemingly major transformations in technology every decade or so that change how we do business. In the 2010s, it was the Cloud. Then next decade, he speculates, that maelstrom of change will stem from “containerization.” While not new, he argues that the level of focus on containers and their ability to help organizations streamline IT processes make it a game-changer.

He outlines three key benefits to the approach:

1. Speed is enhanced in a containerized world because there are fewer pieces of software between the container and the hardware that is executing the container. So, applications execute faster.
2. Choice is enhanced with a standardized container structure because you now can easily choose a particular platform for a specific application and change easily if you need to do so. This is important in a multi-cloud and in a hybrid environment.
3. Optimization of spend when comparing the costs of a fully-containerized environment to that of a fully-virtualized VM environment. Examples have been published showing that a full conversion to containers can yield annual infrastructure and application cost savings in the range of 30% less.

According to Christianson, “A container strategy has to bridge both the public and the private areas. Containers enable you to make a step forward to collapsing technology stack and elimination unneeded weight that typically come along with virtual machines.”

Assuming that containers and Dev/Ops is your strategy for both re-platforming traditional monolithic apps and for developing new apps; then the next part of the strategy should be standardizing the open-source tools that the Dev/Ops teams use into a virtualized (not bare metal) environment, and combining that standardization with security and compliance into a controllable, cost-contained, multi-location (cloud or physical), multi-tenant infrastructure.

By: John Duffy, Chief Technologist and Strategist
CPP Associates