Digital transformation trends have changed the way IT businesses function, bringing software delivery and lowering operational costs to the forefront.
To the question as to ‘what brought this change?’, the IT industry’s answer is ‘DevOps and Containers’!
One of the leading reports on IT professionals’ and enterprises’ top preferences places ‘container management’ at the top.
Most enterprises consider ‘containers’ to enhance software delivery, minimize operational expenditures, meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and ensure security and compliance.
Top 10 priorities underpinned by the surveys for Containers Implementation and DevOps in production and at scale:
1) Integration with Existing Enterprise IT
Integrating containers with the existing enterprise IT infrastructure remains a priority for most enterprises, with a focus on infrastructure elements such as networks, hypervisors, storage, server automation, clouds, and configuration management tools.
While 62% of the surveyed consider this as ‘very important,’ 23% consider it ‘critical,’ followed by 14% ‘important’ and 1% ‘unimportant.’
2) Security and Compliance
Another priority is bringing in containers that match an organization’s security and compliance factors. The thought is all about differences in container lifecycle management over traditional Virtual Machines (VMs).
Security and compliance (36%), followed by Performance (22%), Complexity (21%), Personnel skillset (12%), and Availability (9%), remain the key container management pain points.
3) Prioritize Operations Teams
Current infrastructure, platform, and application operators find it hard to manage container environments. Considering the pace of container implementation and the demand for containerized applications, scalability, security, and compliance are crucial to container operations. So, container management solutions cannot just be developer-oriented. IT operations teams have a special role.
4) Hybrid Infrastructure is Crucial
Containers can be hosted off and on-premises. The survey found 53% of enterprises using containers on on-premise VMs, followed by 38% on off-premise container services, 36% on on-premise bare metal services, 32% on off-premise VMs, and off-premise bare metal services.
Meanwhile, 26% of enterprises also look at container management solutions to manage Function-as-a-Service (FaaS).
5) Kubernetes Management
Kubernetes is known for its effective container orchestration and scheduling framework. Because of this, it is considered a standard for container deployment and management in production and at scale. By providing standard APIs, Kubernetes simplifies code deployment for developers in line with organizational IT policies within a shorter timeframe.
6) Microservices
These are functional components with standardized APIs that can be combined into modern apps or integrated into traditional enterprise applications. 63% of today’s microservices-based apps run on containers, followed by 30% planning to do so within 12 months and 8% with no such plans. So, the transition to microservices is definitely a big push for container adoption.
7) Application-centric Management
Application-centric container management makes many things easier in the application delivery chain without dependence on underlying IT infrastructure. These include policy-driven deployment, monitoring and scaling, and updates and upgrades of all containerized applications.
Thus, the application-centric Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) management model forms an abstraction layer above container services, making it easier for customers to choose between application deployment in the data center or cloud platform.
8) Declarative Automation and Management
Another top priority is the transition to declarative management, which completely relies on Dev and Ops teams to decide an application’s state. Security and compliance checks are also key to this application management lifecycle process. Declarative automation and container management help rapidly achieve scalability and portability at the cross-platform level.
9) VMs, Containers, PaaS, and FaaS Together
It has to be noted that the classic combination of all these yields better results. In the survey, most developers opted for containers (alongside PaaS) to achieve flexibility. Some said containers, along with PaaS, help easily onboard legacy apps.
The percentage of others who said ‘IT operations preferred containers over PaaS’ is less, and far less is the percentage of enterprises who said ‘PaaS is either hard or not accepted by developers’. This clearly shows how significant the combination of containers and other functionalities, like PaaS, FaaS, etc., can be.
10) Containerization Know-how
Containerization can be a compelling factor owing to its advantages in driving app delivery cycles. However, it’s important to study the business use cases, host and hardware dependencies, configurations, and variables, among others, that can reduce operational complexity in application containerization.
Now that you have the Top 10 priorities for adopting containers, it’s time to plan for a full-fledged container implementation strategy.
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