We are now less than a week away from Cisco Live Berlin and I’m eagerly looking forward to sharing what’s happening in OpenStack around containers and hearing from our customers and partners on where they are on their cloud journey. Enterprises and Service Providers (Telcos) are coming to terms with where and how to use containers with enterprises leading the way here. Over the past year I’ve had a number of discussions with customers who are making their transformative journey from an appliance based private cloud world to a more agile hybrid cloud model. Container enquiries are growing as customers look to deploy their workloads in a hybrid cloud environment.
OpenStack continues to grow share of mind among enterprises and Telcos as the big 3 cloud providers continue to innovate at a breathtaking pace. Amazon’s recent reinvent conference was a prime example where Amazon once again announced a tremendous number of feature releases on AWS. Only OpenStack remains, from a true open source standpoint with a similar (if not better velocity of feature) expansion driving more and more customers to adopt OpenStack as an alternative for private clouds. As they prepare for a hybrid cloud model for their business models, IT is beginning to embrace technologies that can support rapid/easy deployment of applications/services. According to 451 Research Dec 2016 report (Containers Rise to the Challenges of Hybrid IT), IT are rapidly embracing a hybrid environment where workloads need to be deployed across various cloud infrastructures. Container are helping solve the problem of portability and deployment across these diverse cloud infrastructure.
One of the biggest issues with workload migration across multi-cloud has been the speed at which workloads running inside VM’s can be deployed. Containers being lightweight dramatically reduce the time to startup and restart, allowing IT/operators to quickly respond to changing load scenarios. Using containers also helps better (efficiently) utilize compute resources in a DC/pod allowing operators to quickly standup and shutdown workloads on select portions of the DC. Customers (e.g. financial sector) are beginning to address security concerns of containers (break outs, user space) by running them individually (e.g. docker) or in pods/clusters (e.g. Kubernetes) within VM’s. Others (as the 451 Research finding points out) are looking to run containers separately from VM’s in production.
A large majority of applications remain legacy based (e.g. Telco Virtual Network Functions). Such applications are complex and are heavily dependent on versions of the underlying OS and kernel. These dependencies result in them being run within VM’s as they can then run isolated from the underlying OS. However application developers are beginning to write cloud-aware applications from scratch that scale horizontally over abstracted hardware. Such cloudy applications are perfect for running in a distributed/redundant fashion inside containers.
OpenStack with its diversity of projects addressing different container requirements is well positioned to provide a choice of solutions for customers who are deploying /planning to deploy their applications/services on a private cloud. Come hear about what some of these projects are and how you can leverage them. Learn about who is deploying what OpenStack container projects and how at Cisco Live Berlin, Upcoming Container Based Services in OpenStack - DEVNET-1102 on 22.02.17 (Wednesday) 14:00 - Hall 2.2, The Hub, DevNet Classroom 2.