Sitting back at the office getting work done, keeping the ship afloat, living the Ops life of the perception of DevOps, only to have your IT Director, VP or CxO come and demand, “Why aren’t we using Containers! It’s all the rage at FillInTheBlankCon!” And they start spouting off the Container of the week, Kubernetes, Mesos, Docker, CoreOS, Rocket, Photon, Marathon, and another endless Container product, accessory or component of a container. If it hasn’t happened to you, that may be a future you’ll be looking at. If it has happened to you, or you’ve already adopted some approach to Containers in your environment even more the better.
Just as a VERY brief primer in the infinite world of containers for those of you who are not aware I’ll try to overly simplify it here. Using the following image as an example and comparing it to Virtualization. Typically, Virtualization is hardware running a hypervisor to which you abstract of the hardware and install an Operating System on the VM and then install your applications into that. Whereas in most container scenarios you have hardware, running some kind of abstraction layer which you present Containers where you install your applications, abstracting out the Operating System.
So quite possibly the most overly simplified version of it because there are MANY moving parts under the covers to make this a reality and make it possible. However, who cares how it works as much as how you can use it to improve your environment, right?!
That’s kind of the key of things, Docker one of the more commonly known Container approaches (albeit technically Kubernetes is used more) has some real cool benefits and features of it. Docker officially has support for running Docker Containers on Microsoft Servers, Azure and AWS, and they also released Docker for Windows clients and OSX! One particular benefit there that I like as a VMware user ishttp://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2016/10/powercli-core-is-now-available-on-docker-hub.htmlPowerCLI Core is now available on Docker Hub!
But they don’t really care about how you’re going to use it, because all roads lead to DevOps and how you’re supposed to implement things to make their lives better. But in the event that you will be forced down a road of learning a particular Container approach for better or worse it’s probably best to find a way to make it better your life rather than just another piece of infrastructure we’re expected to understand even if we don’t. I’m not saying that one Container is better than another, I’ll leave that up to you guys to make that particular determination in the comments if you have Container stories to share. Though I’m particular to Kubernetes when it comes to running cloud services on Google, but then I really like Docker when it comes to running Docker for OSX (because I run OSX )
The applications are endless and continually growing and the solutions are plentiful, some might say far too plentiful depending. What are some of the experiences you’ve had with containers, the good the bad and the ugly, or is it an entirely new road you’re looking at pursuing but haven’t yet? We’re definitely in the no judgement zone!
As always I appreciate your insight into how ya’ll use these technologies to better yourselves and your organizations as we all grow together!