“Our experience has been that many customers demand flexibility that cannot be offered by traditional platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions,” said Eamon Moore, managing director with E-MIT Solutions. Breaking down the issues that have brought the concept of containerisation front and centre in the cloud market, he added, “A lack of granular control of the environment outside the application code is often a barrier to operational success. Containerisation solves this issue as applications are completely portable and can be loaded anywhere.”
This, he said, provides developers in particular with complete flexibility and consistency when developing applications, and he was far from the only cloud industry expert who was of the opinion that containerisation is making a major difference to the cloud market. Just over a year on from VMware announcing it would work with containerisation leaders Docker, enabling enterprises to run and manage containerised applications directly on a hybrid cloud service or VMware infrastructure, the “competitive advantage” the idea offers is proving very attractive to businesses, said ShoreTel’s Spencer Bradshaw.
Reduced needs
Bradshaw, Shoretel’ EMEA manager of advanced applications and solution architects, said that both solution providers and businesses are always looking for that advantage, “whether by deploying a similar service faster and more efficiently or by trying to reduce operating costs.” He added that PaaS services that utilise containerisation can achieve this by reducing deployment time, licensing costs, hardware overheads and support outlay.
A lack of granular control of the environment outside the application code is often a barrier to operational success. Containerisation solves this issue as applications are completely portable and can be loaded anywhere, Eamon Moore, E-MIT Solutions
“Unlike virtual machines,” added Bradshaw, “containers don’t require a version of the operating system to function. Instead, they can share information across multiple containers and reduce both the cost and the number of physical devices needed.”
Noting that Docker has “led the way” in the containerisation market thus far, Moore was also interested to note that Microsoft is now “focusing on this technology in the upcoming release of its new operating system Windows Server 2016,” with Windows server containers “being used to package an application.” This means that applications can, he said, be “easily moved across different servers with a specific Hyper-V container being released as part of the portfolio for applications that require strong security.”
Knock-on effect
EMEA vice president for sales engineering with Salesforce, Carl Dempsey, said that the fact containerisation has become a “hot” term recently, and has probably had the knock-on effect of bringing “more CIOs and CTOs to look at cloud solutions,” something he welcomed.
Gerry Murray, senior vice president and EMEA general manager for Xterity Cloud Services, said too that any advances to “containerisation, multi-tenancy isolation features in the cloud will help make PaaS more consumable.” With that said though, he added that, PaaS has a “somewhat grey definition” when compared to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).
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