Expectations of enterprise IT have never been higher.
By Bill Bryce, Univa Vice President of Products
Because of intense competition in the marketplace, IT is pressured to deliver more, and do it faster. IT teams need to maximize what they have, make sure nothing gets dropped, respond to urgent conditions and make ever more progress to help businesses succeed. Yes, there is intense pressure…but there is also the opportunity for unprecedented creativity.
There are many things required to help enterprise IT deliver on its obligations; one single solution is not going to be sufficient. Yet at the same time, containers, especially the Docker version, can dramatically help IT departments and software developers deliver solutions faster and with more flexibility.
There are several reasons why this acceleration occurs. First, some containerized applications can be written, tested and launched into production faster and much more easily. The container itself defines what the application needs in order to execute. It allows the developer to give the application and all it requires to other groups, which can then easily run and replicate the application environment. That saves time and money and reduces errors.
And containers have a second benefit related to their portability. Once software is defined within containers, those containers can also be run in-house on company-managed servers or public cloud services much more readily. So, if an IT department wants to expand capacity, it can quickly respond and use public cloud services. Further, containers may be smaller and lighter than applications that typically run on servers and virtual machines. It’s possible to run many more of them on the infrastructure and raise utilization of these servers so that the data center becomes more efficient at the same time.
For these reasons, Docker containers, for example, are being rapidly adopted by developer communities, providing a more responsive and efficient application development process. However, it should be noted that IT operations managers seeking to incorporate containers within corporate production systems require proven orchestration and scheduling software, as well as management and configuration tools, to scale appropriately and take advantage of Docker’s benefits.
Feeling the pressure? Containerizing applications can provide a faster time to market, better efficiency and lower costs. It’s time to make enterprises truly ready for containers, in production, at scale.
