Welcome to
Virtualization and Beyond
Does the Cloud and Containerization Mean the End of Traditional Virtualization?
By Steven Hunt, Sr. Product Manager and Strategist,
SolarWinds
At VMworld 2015, there was much information and discussion
regarding the future of virtualization. More specifically, how emerging
technology concepts, like cloud and containers, are impacting that future. While
these technologies are sure to affect the future of virtualization, it's worth
taking a closer look at them and how great their impact will really be.
Cloud
It's safe to say the cloud era is here and in full effect.
It doesn't matter whether we are talking about public, private, hybrid, software
as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service
(PaaS), etc., many organizations are at least considering adopting cloud
computing in one form or another.
In the early days of cloud, SaaS was the dominate form. The rise
of companies like Salesforce.com is a prominent testament to the success of the
SaaS model. Quickly following came the gradual adoption of IaaS. But all of the
grandeur regarding cloud computing was not, and is not, without its drawbacks. Thus,
many organizations were and still are resistant to moving all applications and
data to the cloud for varying reasons. This has led to the introduction of the
hybrid cloud approach.
Hybrid cloud seems to provide a solution to many of the
problems associated with using a pure cloud strategy. Organizations can quickly
scale out the applications they need to in the cloud, but still keep sensitive
data within their data center. It's seemingly the best of both worlds. Public
cloud vendors like Amazon and Microsoft are even adopting ways to allow companies
to seamlessly connect to AWS and Azure, and make the cloud an extension of the
datacenter.
Containers
The strong emergence of containers is already making an
impact today. Even Microsoft is working on container support. In case you've
been living under a rock, here
is some insight as to what container technology is all about. In short,
containers allow an application to have all of its dependencies packaged with
it, and remove the requirement of ensuring the operating system has those
dependencies for runtime. This makes the application ultra-portable and less
susceptible to compatibility issues when transitioning to and from environments.
Containers have huge, broader implications for the future,
but right now, the technology is mainly seeing growth with organizations that
develop or run Linux-based applications. However, as the technology matures and
sees wider adoption, we will potentially see Linux and Windows applications written to support the distribution of
packaged containers for general consumption by the IT systems administrator.
The Future of
Virtualization
However, none of this means the end of traditional virtualization.
It's simply an evolution. What we know as traditional virtualization will
slowly have its footprint reduced, but still live in coexistence with technologies
such as cloud and containers. In the end, what companies will focus on is the
best technologies and methodologies for deploying and supporting the
applications that users rely on. And that will likely be a multi-faceted
approach for most companies, as different applications will benefit differently
in the new landscape.
Moving forward, a new set of solutions will be required to
support this evolved environment. They will require the ability to interact
with a wide range of technologies and solve a broad set of problems. Even
though native solutions and tools will be available, IT organizations will be
looking for those with a greater scope of interaction. This has been the trend
since the last recession, and it will not likely end anytime soon. Everyone
will continue to seek out how to do more with less.
In this coming mixed landscape of virtualization, cloud and
containers, administrators will need the tools to discern the performance and
issues related to all environment delivery methods. Not only will it be
imperative to see the performance and issues, but administrators will also need
to benefit from information related to root cause and path to resolution.
Already today, administrators struggle to keep up with
expertise in all of the areas they manage. The addition of more technologies,
like containers, will increase that ever expanding knowledge gap. The tools
that are able to bridge that knowledge gap will become extremely valuable for a
vast majority of IT organizations.
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About the Author
Steven has been involved in the IT industry for more than 10
years, focusing on server-based computing, desktop virtualization, end user
computing and server virtualization solutions for SMB to enterprise
environments. Currently, he is responsible for product strategy for server and application
monitoring and virtualization
management at SolarWinds.
Make sure to also read, "On-Premises versus Cloud-based Storage" , "Virtualization Security on the Front Lines" and "In the New Wild West of Storage, the Virt Admin is Sheriff"