Digital business requires modern infrastructure
As technology advances, customer demand for digital services grows. To meet these expectations, many organizations are modernizing their IT environments with cloud-native infrastructure and approaches. Using emerging technologies and cultural innovation, organizations can deliver dynamic, personalized digital customer experiences while improving internal business practices.
Successful modernization requires evolution in applications, processes, and infrastructure. New application architectures enable fast, flexible delivery of new features to accelerate business value. Agile business processes improve operational efficiency and speed response to changing market conditions. Cloud-based infrastructure allows organizations to better control costs and take advantage of emerging innovation. Containers are a key technology for IT modernization and optimization.
What are containers?
Linux® containers allow you to package and isolate applications with their entire runtime environment — all of the files necessary to run. This makes it easy to move the contained application between environments while retaining full functionality. The host operating system provides containers with resource management, abstraction, and security capabilities while enforcing container resource quotas and isolation. Figure 1 shows a comparison of traditional, virtual, and container software stacks.
Modernize your applications, processes, and infrastructure
IT modernization initiatives can use containers — integrated with a container platform that provides development and deployment capabilities — to fundamentally change applications, processes, and infrastructure. Application life-cycle management, build automation, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) capabilities make containers an ideal development foundation. Plus, automated deployment, scaling, and management functionality allows containers to operate across hybrid environments alongside existing applications and IT investments.
Applications
Using containers and microservices, you can rapidly develop cloud-native applications, speeding time to market for new products and features. The building blocks of modern applications, microservices are minimal, complete, and composable services with limited dependencies. Containerized microservices can be deployed and updated quickly and independently. Container orchestration platforms manage microservice deployments at scale and provide integrated service discovery.
Processes
Containers also help you adopt agile development processes that increase efficiency and collaboration between development and operations teams. By packaging applications and dependencies into containers, developers can provide operations with a consistent management process for all applications. Immutable application packages can easily be moved between development, test, and production environments without rebuilding the application. As a result, development and operations can use a single, shared container platform that addresses both teams’ core requirements.
Infrastructure
Containerized applications and services scale easily across hybrid environments — including physical, virtual, and private, public, and edge cloud infrastructure — giving you choice and flexibility for enterprise workloads. Containers provide a standard and portable package that can be deployed consistently and rapidly across physical and virtual machines in any on-site or cloud environment.
Adopt containers with Red Hat and Microsoft
Red Hat and Microsoft provide a production-ready, containerized environment with a hybrid cloud foundation. Shown in Figure 2, Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud and multicloud deployments. It is optimized to improve developer productivity and promote innovation. Self-service capabilities let you develop, deploy, and manage traditional and container-based applications seamlessly across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures. Advanced security features help protect your containerized environment by preventing tenants from compromising other containers or the underlying host.
Spanning more than 60 regions, Microsoft Azure is a global network of some of the world’s largest datacenters. It integrates seamlessly with your on-site datacenter and provides a comprehensive set of cloud services for building, deploying, and managing container-based applications. More than 70 compliance offerings help you keep resources in alignment with regulations and policies. Additionally, Microsoft Azure Security Center supplies a central view of your Azure resources to aid in threat detection and mitigation. Azure Active Directory provides identity governance and access management that work seamlessly with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
Together, the native high-availability features of Microsoft Azure and the advanced application management capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform create a reliable, stable container-ready environment. The Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform interface lets you easily create and deploy applications on Microsoft Azure using Linux-based microservices. Migrating on-site development and test environments to a container-ready environment can also improve performance, flexibility, and control.