Container technology in the age of the customer

Written by Sachin Shridhar, Senior Director of APAC Services (Red Hat)

As the IT industry moves from monolithic apps to microservices, container technology can meet the demands for faster app delivery without sacrificing quality.

In the digital economy, businesses are expected to deliver value quickly, consistently and over multiple platforms. This has increased application delivery expectations on IT departments to deliver more software than ever before, and faster.

Container technology is not new, as its roots can be traced back to UNIX V7 (circa 1979) and Oracle Solaris Zones (circa 2004). Its recent revival is brought about by an emerging call for developers to move self-contained and isolated monolithic apps to microservices. Many organizations are finding that they can embrace newer technologies and deliver software faster by embracing fine-grained, microservice architectures. Container technology makes this possible.

As new workloads become part of the same connected application fabric, they have to be flexibly woven together to quickly serve particular business needs. When such needs change, these apps should be easily recomposed and repurposed for other requirements.

This trend is backed up by a recent Forrester survey commissioned by Red Hat of approximately 200 enterprise IT professionals worldwide. The study establishes that increased business demand is driving widespread and diverse container adoption at a global level: 71 percent already use or anticipate using containers for cloud applications and 77 percent for data applications.

Build applications that run everywhere

In an ideal world, modern apps should be agile and deployable over a standard platform – regardless of whether they run on bare metal, virtual machines or in containers.

One way to bridge this utopia to reality is by deploying applications on a purpose-built container host that spans the open hybrid cloud such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host, a new variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux based on the upstream open source collaboration, Project Atomic.

A lightweight, secure and reliable container-optimized host, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host makes it easier and faster for apps to spin up and scale out, enabling businesses to release innovations with much greater frequency and without having to worry about performance or reliability, thanks to a stable foundation built on the backbone of the world's leading enterprise Linux platform.

Organisations that have realized the benefits of virtualization will appreciate using containers in situations that don’t necessitate virtualizing entire machines. And Red Hat believes this deployment agility is the complementary next step to virtualization.

To this end, Red Hat’s cloud-based application development platform, OpenShift by Red Hat has been redesigned to fully support containers. OpenShift Enterprise 3 is the first enterprise-ready web-scale container application platform based on Docker formatted Linux containers, Kubernetes orchestration and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, providing full support from the operating system to application runtimes. As a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), developers can use its capabilities to develop, host and scale applications in a cloud environment, and OpenShift can deliver them via containers – to be quickly deployed anywhere as intended, and to help enterprises run a better business for their customers.

Want to learn more about maximizing the benefits of containers? Download this whitepaper now.

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