- The major impediments to containers in a production environment adoption are concerns over security and management at scale.
- Organizations have already made significant investments in machine virtualization (virtual infrastructure) and are unlikely to abandon that investment.
- Non-containerized applications and services will continue to need to be hosted and serviced into the future.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Containers don’t replace VMs, yet: It will be beneficial for all near term to adopt containers on virtualized infrastructure.
- The future of software packaging: You will need to adopt containers in the near future. Software will soon begin to ship in containers, and you will be required to host them.
- Not just a technology change: Containers require a change in people and process, with different/new development and operations roles and responsibilities in new agile processes.
Impact and Result
- IT infrastructure groups should resolve to create container-ready infrastructure that will meet both the requirements of developers and apps managers and the availability, recoverability, and security requirements of the enterprise.
- In the short term, the best solution is likely to be hosting containers on container-ready VMs running Linux and a container engine like Docker. This may not be optimal for performance but will be optimal for securing and assuring availability for the underlying infrastructure.
- Longer term, enterprises should pilot running containers on bare metal to become familiar with the emerging tools for managing containers. The future is likely a hybrid of virtualized infrastructure and bare metal container infrastructure.