Page 32 - EngineerIT November 2022

CONTAINERISATION

The power of partnerships unlocks

advantages of containerisation

By Phillip de Waal, systems engineering manager, Nutanix Sub-Saharan Africa

ccording to a global survey, 61% of organisations believe that containerisation will play a
strategic role over the coming 18 months. Furthermore, 30% of companies already use
Athree or more cloud environments, with 56% using at least one container platform. With
89% of businesses stating they are reliant on a multi-cloud strategy to remain competitive, the
focus is on leveraging containerised workloads that span multiple clouds while not ignoring
existing investments in on-premises solutions.
Inter-operability across both owned and rented IT systems is essential to realise this value.
Even so, it remains a significant challenge for organisations looking to benefit from evolving
hybrid multi-cloud operations. The transition to embracing the open hybrid cloud that enables
this will be the priority over the coming months. Companies want modern applications that
deliver more dynamic user experiences. This requires a platform that provides the consistency
and scalability essential for hybrid multi-cloud environments.
The evolving variety and blending of different technologies used to run hybrid multi-cloud
operations are bringing together companies like Red Hat and Nutanix. Putting in place new
partnerships is a critical building block, as organisations need to find the balance between
innovation and managing the resulting complexity that comes from hybrid multi-cloud
environments, even if they are using containers.
Phillip de Waal
Keep it simple, stupid
These partnerships can simplify hybrid multi-cloud application development, management and Kubernetes boost
mobility. In the Red Hat and Nutanix example, this means that as a Red Hat certified hypervisor, Even today, most cloud-native infrastructure
Nutanix AHV lets IT departments run and manage Red Hat, Enterprise, Linux and OpenShift in solutions do not deliver the scalability
virtual machines with more confidence. and resilience that enterprise Kubernetes
The power of partnerships also means that inter-operability and the mutual deployment demands. They also lack integration across
of technology become business enablers as opposed to inhibitors. Containers in the cloud key infrastructure layers or simplify life
can deliver the veritable secret sauce to realising this value, as the technology provides the cycle management and developer tooling
link between partners to unlock the full potential of their associated solution environments. to the detriment of customisability. It
Through this, the hybrid multi-cloud can start realising a more effective return on investment comes down to having access to best-
and expand on the existing underlying legacy layer of an organisation without losing any of the in-class infrastructure solutions that are
investments already made. vendor-certified and jointly supported by all
Within this, partners also need to empower their corporate clients to meet rapidly changing partners.
compliance rules. At the same time, these businesses must still support a legacy installed Therefore, cloud infrastructure is
customer base and legacy products. With start-ups not hampered by ageing infrastructure, essential to handle the changing demands
incumbents must harness partner-driven solutions that can enable them to deploy and scale of web-scale containerised applications. The
as the market demands and not be constrained by what their existing environment can deliver. infrastructure must also be able to linearly
Using containers means that an organisation can rapidly spin up instances without having to go scale performance and capacity without
through six months of testing prior to production. limit to ensure it is the ideal environment
for supporting enterprise cloud-native
A virtualised world workloads. Through this, operationalising
When virtualisation began building momentum more than a decade ago, the focus was on an enterprise Kubernetes environment for
doing the simple things right. It was a case of replicating operating systems and desktops to a hybrid multi-cloud environments becomes a
high degree of consistency. When this moved beyond the basics, companies were left frustrated less complex undertaking.
by a lack of performance. It was then that the industry, all the virtualisation and cloud vendors, Organisations need flexible, reliable, and
and the hardware OEMs began investing in technology that was consistent and could deliver on economical solutions to run containerised
expectations from both experience and performance points of view. workloads in their data centres, whether
Adaption was key to this shift. Of course, the fact that the environment was open on-premises or in the cloud. Partners that
source driven certainly helped matters significantly. Returning to the Red Hat and Nutanix can play off each other’s strengths can
partnership example, the Nutanix cloud platform is now a preferred choice for hyper-converged streamline the solutions to take care of
infrastructure for Red Hat at Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift. Both companies are infrastructure, software and container-level
working together on driving inter-operability for their clients. This is the crux of the matter – the concerns to realise the benefits of open
power of partnerships to realise value through technology innovation. hybrid clouds. n

EngineerIT | November 2022 | 32