Containers Survival Guide for Infrastructure
Containers are coming! Get ready now (if you haven’t already).
- 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.
Workshop: Containers Survival Guide for Infrastructure
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Identify the Need for Containers
The Purpose
- Discuss the anticipated benefits/concerns with containers with stakeholders.
- Assess enterprise workloads to identify deployment needs.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Establish a need for containers in the enterprise.
Activities
Outputs
Explore business benefits of containers.
- List of container adoption benefits
Discuss container pain points/concerns.
- List of container adoption concerns
Assess container use in your organization.
- Shortlist of systems that might want containerization
Complete Containers Assessment Workbook.
- Data that will be used to decide on container deployment needs
Module 2: Develop a Container Adoption Strategy
The Purpose
- Develop a short-term and long-term container adoption strategy.
- Assemble the ideal container software ecosystem.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Utilize current infrastructure for containers.
- Test container native infrastructure.
- Adopt a container software ecosystem that fits your organizational needs.
Activities
Outputs
Compare containers and VMs
- A list of pros and cons associated with containers and VMs
Explore workload deployment needs.
- An understanding of your deployment needs
List initiatives to adopt containers on VM.
- List of initiatives for adopting a containers on VMs model
Develop a bare-metal container pilot.
- List of requirements and initiatives for piloting container-native infrastructure
Module 3: Roadmap Your Container Adoption Plans
The Purpose
- Identify the tools needed to adopt containers.
- Prioritize initiatives for adopting containers.
- Build the Container Adoption Roadmap.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Select the tools that best fit your organization.
- Manage timelines for completing container adoption initiatives.
Activities
Outputs
Assemble ideal container ecosystem.
- Container ecosystem custom fit to your needs
Build collective agreements document.
- Document to govern container development and deployment
Build container adoption roadmap.
- Roadmap to communicate journey
Prioritize roadmap initiatives.
- Initiatives and target dates to include in roadmap
Module 4: Assemble the Containers Executive Communications Report
The Purpose
- Assemble a Containers Executive Communications Report for stakeholders.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Effectively communicate your journey to adopting containers.
Activities
Outputs
Identify and assemble the components of the Containers Executive Communications Report.
- Containers Executive Communications Report
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A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
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Guided Implementation 1: Analyze the business case for containers
- Call 1: Identify key stakeholders, and explore how containers can benefit your organization.
- Call 2: Assess your need for containers by examining the deployment needs of your applications and workloads
Guided Implementation 2: Develop a container adoption strategy
- Call 1: Explore the differences between the various application and workload deployment models.
- Call 2: Develop a plan for piloting containers on bare-metal infrastructure.
- Call 3: Assemble the ideal container software ecosystem.
Guided Implementation 3: Develop and communicate the roadmap
- Call 1: Establish best practices between development and operations; build a collective agreements document.
- Call 2: Build roadmap and identify container adoption timeline for milestones.
- Call 3: Assemble and executive communications report for stakeholder communication.
Contributors
- Brandon Philips, CTO, CoreOS
- Daniel Walsh, Consulting Engineer – Containers/Docker Team Lead, Red Hat
- David Aronchick, Product Manager, Google
- David Messina, VP Marketing, Docker
- Kim Weins, VP Marketing, RightScale
- Mathew Lodge, COO, Weaveworks
- Sean Chittenden, Engineering Manager, HashiCorp
- Shannon Williams, VP Sales and Marketing, Rancher Labs
- Sheng Liang, CEO, Rancher Labs
- Tim Miller, VP Engineering, RightScale
- 1 anonymous contributor