DevOps is the IT approach that combines development and operations in one unified front. Containerisation, a system of packaging up code into software micro-environments for flexible deployments, is one of the driving forces behind DevOps. This makes containers one of the most important technology solutions for 2016.
Colin McCabe, director, consulting and training, Red Hat, shares, “DevOps is all about being able to work on things faster, and DevOps has two key elements: microservices and containers. Microservices are small, independent software processes, while containers are the frameworks within which these microservices can be moved around and deployed.
“You can compare DevOps with Lego blocks, where you can easily modify the structure to make very different things. This flexibility lets people concentrate on the application being developed and its speed to market, rather than the development process itself. This new way of doing things, underpinned by microservices and containers, is rapidly transforming IT.”
The rise of hybrid IT and multiple cloud deployments is also contributing to the importance of containers in the IT industry. The ease with which containers can be used to deploy code in almost any compute environment is fundamentally changing how IT departments approach development.
Colin McCabe further adds, “The promise of containers is that, whichever language your application is written in, whichever technologies it might use, you can still package and deploy them across a wide variety of environments with limited recoding. With containers, there’s consistency across environments, as well as portability and choice.”
Containers offer a way for application microservices to be reusable, helping IT departments save time on development and money on servers. However, organisations need to be aware of security questions around containers. There are a growing number of container options that can provide the security needed to use containers safely.
Colin McCabe concludes that, “IT teams are looking at containerisation to speed up their development processes and make operations more cost-effective. For containers to dominate the IT industry in 2016 and beyond, security needs to become a top priority. Once security is taken care of, containerisation stands as one of the major driving forces of the IT industry in the coming year.”
