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ICT

Containerisation is key for businesses

needing to do more with less

By Modeen Malick, senior systems engineer at Commvault South Africa

t a time when economic pressures are forcing businesses to sweat their IT assets
and do more with less, container technology and Kubernetes can be instrumental.
AAchieving what is needed can be done by running more applications on fewer
servers, bundling and running applications seamlessly, and dramatically reducing time to
market for new products and services.
Containers are similar to virtual machines (VMs), with file systems, central processing
units (CPUs) and their own memory, but with the added benefit of being decoupled from
the underlying infrastructure, so they are portable. Thus they offer a new way to build,
organise and run cloud applications, which are scalable, agile, faster and quicker to deploy.
Kubernetes is the most popular containerisation platform, and all major cloud providers
offer it as part of their service portfolio. While Kubernetes may not solve all challenges,
it does offer huge benefits. These include increased utilisation and integration compared
to VMs and also solving issues such as enterprise production outages after a code or
application deployment due to versioning conflicts. Modeen Malick
Kubernetes provides a framework to run distributed systems resiliently, by managing
failover and scalability of systems. In addition, the Return on Investment (ROI) is business- This distributed nature also separates
focused, enabling businesses to become more lightweight and use fewer resources components, potentially creating gaps
compared to monolithic physical environments or VMs. where security risks could creep in.
When an application is installed,
Better server utilisation troubleshooting becomes a challenge
Containerisation allows businesses to drive up server utilisation, adding value by reducing due to the sheer number of opportunities
unnecessary resources, and container orchestration allows businesses to auto-mount the for misconfiguration and vulnerability.
storage of choice, whether local or in the cloud, for unprecedented flexibility and agility. In addition, it does not provide a native
It also offers automated rollout and roll back, which allows for swapping between mechanism to encrypt, manage and
restore points and going back to any given point in time. Faster reaction and time share sensitive information, meaning that
to market are hugely beneficial when business demands such agility. If Kubernetes a data management system becomes a
is properly implemented, the biggest benefit is seen in the productivity gains of the crucial component.
organisation and its staff, and the improvements in go-to-market speed. Organisations wanting to get the
This technology also provides more time on code, which means businesses have most out of their Kubernetes investment
more time to develop features their customers want and spend less time on debugging. must have strong governance policies
Kubernetes can be commissioned on the fly, and guarantee consistency for deployment, and procedures in place. Businesses
for improved testing capability. need to look at how images are being
Furthermore, it reduces spend on operating system licences and decreases the built, how sensitive data is being handled,
number of manhours required to patch and fix. It also decreases the need for costly stored and accessed. From a security
support for legacy environments and is open source, so there are many support perspective, visibility is critical in terms of
resources available. understanding what is being deployed,
where and how, who is accessing it,
Adoption challenge and whether or not it is compliant with
However, as with any technology implementation, the biggest challenge is ensuring enterprise requirements.
adoption by IT operations and staff, thus ensuring that people, processes and technologies While Kubernetes is powerful, it is not
work together. In addition, backup and recovery, data management and security are still the right choice for every team and every
requirements, so businesses need to consider how these will be affected by the adoption situation. It is made to solve a certain
of containerisation. set of problems, and if these problems
Finally, the Kubernetes ecosystem has numerous deployment options, including in are not your business’ problems, it may
the cloud, on premise and hybrid scenarios, so data management is crucial to ensure that end up being more trouble than it is
organisations do not introduce data risk. worth. Businesses should not implement
Although containers enable speed, portability and a microservice architecture, they also Kubernetes for the sake of it; they need
introduce a few risks: they may create security blind spots and increase the attack surface, to have the right business case to back
because the distributed nature of containers makes it more difficult to maintain visibility. up the investment. n

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