Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Greg O’Connor, CEO, AppZero
Application Migration Containers Will Liberate Existing Applications
The relentless doubling of compute horsepower every 18 - 24 months
known as Moore's Law is one of the trends that has shaped the IT industry.
Machine virtualization and cloud computing have combined to reduce the time it
takes to create a new machine harnessing that computing power to nearly zero.
These mammoth forces plus a bit of application developer productivity have
resulted in an explosion in the number of machines running applications over
the past decade.
As companies try to deal with this
issue of application "sprawl," a new trend - containers - has arrived and is likely the technology that will deliver a key
capability for application portability.
The benefits of staying current and adopting the latest
foundational technologies are undeniable. Faster compute, low-cost network and
storage, reductions in time to market, agility - technical and business- is a
powerful amalgamation of trends that lays the groundwork for a competitive
advantage for many businesses.
The Growing Old
Challenge
"Growing old is like being
increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed. "
-- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
When trying to stay current with new technology, the application
is the complicated part; once installed, it injects its components into the nooks
and crannies of the Operating System, making it extremely difficult to move. As
the application ages it is stuck running on an older OS and older supporting
infrastructure. In a few years the shiny new application exploiting the latest
advances in infrastructure becomes out of date; an albatross and possibly a detriment
to the business.
Aging Infrastructure in the Spotlight
In the summer of 2014, just 12 months before the End of
Support (EOS) of Windows Server 2003, there were 23.8M machines still in
production on that OS. In July 2015 when EOS arrived there were believed to be 15
million. Most of that 8 million in machine reduction was attributed to
decommissioning and wholesale replacement of applications vs. migrating the applications
to a supported OS (WS2008 or WS20012). In addition to running on an OS that was
more than a decade old, an estimated 45% were still running on physical servers
that were almost as old. Multiplying out a doubling in power every 2 years,
these apps were executing in environments that were 5 times slower and 3-5
times more expensive than what is available today.
Aging Infrastructure Expands Exponentially
It becomes clear with time, that the combination
of increased processing power, VM to server density, self-service cloud
computing (with near instantaneous machine provisioning), and falling costs, causes
an increase in the number of new server instances. Experts estimates that when
Windows Sever 2008 nears EOS in 2019 there will be 57M or 2.5 times as many production
machines running as was claimed the year before EOS for WS2003. A simple
doubling puts the WS2012 population at well over 100M in 2024.
The above chart from the 2014 IDC study "The
Cost of Retaining aging IT infrastructure" shows the dramatic increase in
Logical Server Installed Base going from 25M in 2004 to 85M in 2013. If the
trend continues at the same rate, there will be 456M Servers by 2024. One could argue that the growth rate is
increasing because of cloud adoption but even using the 10-year trend line
results in an extremely large number of machines.
Containers
Containerization is the process of
encapsulating an application in a package with its own operating environment.
This provides the benefits of isolating the application and a micro OS for quicker
starts or moving a self-contained application from one machine to another. The containerized application can be run on any suitable
physical or virtual machine without any worries about dependencies. An
isolation layer encapsulates and maintains the separation of application from
OS and machine.
Migration Containers
Migration Containers are purpose-built containers that can
extract existing applications already installed on an Operating System. Once an
application is migrated into a container it can be moved to other machines.
Advanced migration containers will allow for OS "up leveling" when extracted
from an older OS and loaded onto a newer OS.
For example, an application could be moved from a Windows Server 2003 OS
into a migration container and run on Windows Server 2012. Once an application as been packaged into a
migration container it is liberated from the underlying infrastructure and the
aging predicament is solved.
The ability to decouple existing applications from the OS
allows it to be completely portable. The new migration container can be moved
within a datacenter, across geographic distances, moved onto or off of a cloud.
In essence, the application can run anywhere the target OS is running.
Summary
It is clear that there has been a dramatic rise in the number
of production machines due to Moore's Law, machine virtualization and cloud
computing. The economic and competitive advantages of running a business on a
current platform are clear. Once installed and in production, applications tend
to be frozen in time and difficult to move. Containers begin to address the
portability or mobility challenge of staying current.
Migration containers will provide datacenter transformation
in the Windows world, enabling containerization of existing applications that
can deliver the next level of agility to Windows infrastructure architects and
administrators. They will allow existing applications to fast forward into the
future and enable the business to keep its competitive edge.
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About the Author
Greg O'Connor, CEO AppZero
Pioneering the Virtual Application Appliance
approach to simplifying application-lifecycle management, Greg O'Connor is
responsible for translating AppZero's vision into strategic business objectives and financial
results. O'Connor has over 25 years of management and
technical experience in the computer industry.
