Enterprise quandary on container adoption..

The research reports from Forrester and 451 Research show enterprises moving in a positive stride in the adoption of application containerization.

Containers do facilitate rapid agile development, but what is the migration path for enterprise IT?

• VM’s To Containers
• What are the cost savings — Exponential?
• Hybrid Cloud or On-Prem
• Are we ready to move containers in Prod ?
• Are all my security concerns addressed?

Well, let’s look at the very first question. A basic one, but rather important to understand the for the migration move

Virtual Machines:

A decade ago, with the advancement in technologies, as the bare metals were not able to exploit the new abundance in resources of server processing powers and capacity, the genesis of VM’s took place — the very paradigm shift converting your bare metal into a virtual environment.

The hypervisors such as ESX, Hyper-V were designed to run on top of Physical Servers to emulate the hardware for the VMs on top of it. Each Virtual Machine runs a unique guest operating system. VMs with different guest operating systems can be hosted on a single host sharing the resources and thus utilizing the full capabilities of the server. Server virtualization provided tons of benefits, one of the biggest being — application consolidation. Each VM had its own binaries, libraries, app servers etc and could be replicated in no time by just creating an image of that instance.

This brought down IT costs exponentially with faster server provisioning for development, staging and production environments, improved backup and recovery and DRS capabilities.

This also has had its drawbacks nonetheless. Each VM came with its own operating system thus increasing its footprint in GBs and also limiting the portability of applications between public clouds, private clouds, and traditional data centers.

Containers

Over the past few years, there has been tremendous shift in gears towards faster development cycles. Micro-Services , CI/CD , DevOps are a technology buzz. Containers enables this by providing a way to run multiple application instances on a single server or host operating system.

Containers sit on top of a physical server and its host OS — for example, Linux or Windows. Each container shares the host OS kernel and are thus exceptionally “light” — they are only megabytes in size and take just seconds to start, versus gigabytes and minutes for a VM. Containers comes with an advantage of being more portable than VMs across cloud environments too.

So the answer to daunting question of VMs to Containers is really — It depends.

VMs and Containers are for a different use cases and how would you want to set up the IT environment — an hybrid approach on a hybrid cloud may be ?