Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Arun Balachandran, Senior Marketing Analyst, ManageEngine
Containerization and Hybrid Clouds
Containerization will
continue to be a hot trend
Container technology has been hot for the last two years and
will continue to be hot in 2016. Containers basically offer an easier option to
package applications with their dependencies and make them portable across
different operating systems. As containers are lightweight, they address major
performance, deployment, cost and portability issues usually associated with
VMs. Containers can deliver more services using the same hardware used for VMs,
offer better scalability and have faster loading times than a VM image. In
addition, they also reduce development and deployment cycles with iterative
methods and fast builds.
The most popular container technology today is Docker, which
is touted as one of the fastest growing pieces of business software ever.
Initially, most people used Docker to move applications from development to
testing to production. The next step could be to use Docker to move production
apps among Amazon AWS, Windows Azure, Rackspace and other cloud providers.
The emergence of the
container ecosystem
As businesses continue to expand their infrastructure and
grow their microservices, containerization makes troubleshooting a lot easier.
Businesses can also scale and migrate the app faster than would be possible
with more traditional infrastructure. All major VM orchestration systems and
cloud platforms now support Docker. We should see the emergence of a robust
ecosystem for data management and other services in 2016, especially
surrounding Docker's further development and use.
The rise of Google's Kubernetes is also significant.
Kubernetes is a container cluster manager that is open source. It can schedule
and manage numerous container replicas across a group of nodes and many believe
has the potential to revolutionize the industry. Kubernetes could even be the
main orchestrator and controller of containers in future data centers.
Monitoring of running containers will also become a must for
enterprises to ensure that the critical apps used in production are performing
well. Businesses need to keep tabs on resource utilization as well as perform
health checks on the applications running inside the container.
Hybrid cloud adoption
on the rise in enterprises
Public clouds provide convenience and nearly limitless
scale. However, private clouds offer better technical, financial, legal and
usage control. By combining the two into a hybrid set up, enterprises can get
the best of both worlds. For example, they can develop and test on a private
cloud and then deploy the applications on a public cloud. Or, they can run
predictable workloads in their private cloud and unpredictable ones on the
public cloud. They can even move workloads back and forth between private and
public clouds, thanks to API compatibility.
Enterprises have been evaluating hybrid cloud strategies and
deployment models for a while now. Gartner predicts that nearly half of large
enterprises will have a hybrid cloud deployment by the end of 2017, which means
that it's pivotal to learn about the possibilities of this cloud option as soon
as possible so your business can stay up to date.
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About the Author
Arun Balachandran is a senior marketing analyst at ManageEngine, the real-time IT
management company, and currently works for ManageEngine's application
performance management solution. He has a master's degree in computer applications.
Follow Arun on Twitter @barun. For
more information on ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corporation, please visit www.manageengine.com; follow the company
blog at http://blogs.manageengine.com;
on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ManageEngine
and on Twitter @ManageEngine.