How Containers are Becoming The New Basic Currency For Pay as You Go Hybrid IT

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How Containers are Becoming
The New Basic Currency
For Pay as You Go Hybrid IT
A discussion on how IT operators are now looking to increased automation, orchestration, and
compatibility benefits to further exploit containers as a mainstay across their next-generation
hybrid IT estate.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of
the Innovator podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor
Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on the latest insights into
container disruption trends and optimal use strategies.
Container-based deployment models have rapidly gained popularity across a full
spectrum of hybrid IT architectures -- from edge, to cloud, to data center. IT operators
are now looking to increased automation, orchestration, and compatibility benefits to
further exploit containers as a mainstay across their next-generation hybrid IT estate.
Stay with us as we examine innovative container use cases and the escalating benefits
that come from broad container use with Robert Christiansen, Evangelist in the Office of
the Chief Technology Officer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Welcome back,
Robert.
Robert Christiansen: Thank you for having me, Dana.
Gardner: Containers are being used in more ways and in
more places. What was not that long ago a fringe favorite
for certain developer use cases is becoming broadly
disruptive. How disruptive has the container model
become?
Christiansen: Well, it’s the new change in the paradigm.
We are looking to accelerate software releases. This is
the Agile motion. At the end of the day, software is
consuming the world, and if you don’t release software
quicker -- with more features more often -- you are being
left behind.
The mechanism to do that is to break them out into smaller consumable segments that
we can manage. Typically that motion has been adopted at the public cloud level on
Christiansen

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containers, and that is spreading into the broader ecosystem of the enterprises and
private data centers. That is the fundamental piece -- and containers have that purpose.
Gardner: Robert, users are interested in that development and deployment advantage,
but are there also operational advantages, particularly in terms of being able to move
workloads more freely across multiple clouds and hybrid clouds?
Christiansen: Yes, the idea is twofold. First off was to gain agility and motion, and then
people started to ask themselves, “Well, I want to have choice, too.” So as we start
abstracting away the dependencies of what runs a container, such as a very focused
one that might be on a particular cloud provider, I can actually start saying, “Hey, can I
write my container platform services and APIs compatible across multiple platforms?
How do I go between platforms; how do I go between on-prem or in the public cloud?
Gardner: And because containers can be tailored to specific requirements needed to
run a particular service, can they also extend down to the edge and in resource-
constrained environments?
Adjustable containers add flexibility
Christiansen: Yes, and more importantly, they can adjust to sizing issues, too. So think
about pushing a container that’s very lightweight into a host that needs to have high
availability of compute but may be limited on storage.
There are lots of different use cases. As you
collapse the virtualization of an app -- that’s what
a container really does, it virtualizes app
components, it virtualizes app parts and
dependencies. You only deploy the smallest bit of code needed to execute that one
thing. That works in niche uses like a hospital, telecommunications on a cell tower, on an
automobile, on the manufacturing floor, or if you want to do multiple pieces inside a
cloud platform that services a large telco. However you structure it, that’s the type of
flexibility containers provide.
Gardner: And we know this is becoming a very popular model, because the likes of
VMware, the leader in virtualization, is putting a lot of emphasis on containers. They
don’t want to lose their market share, they want to be in the next game, too. And then
Microsoft with Azure Stack is now also talking about containers -- more than I would
have expected. So that’s a proof-point, when you have VMware and Microsoft agreeing
on something.
Christiansen: Yes, that was really interesting actually. I just saw this little blurb that
came up in the news about Azure Stack switching over to a container platform, and I
went, “Wow!” Didn’t they just put in three- or five-years’ worth of R and D? They are
basically saying, “We might be switching this over to another platform.” It’s the right thing
to do.
A container virtualizes app
components, it virtualizes app
parts and dependencies.

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And no one saw Kubernetes coming, or maybe OpenShift did. But the reality now is
containers suddenly came out of nowhere. Adoption has been there for a while, but it’s
never been adopted like it has been now.
Gardner: And Kubernetes is an important part because it helps to prevent complexity
and sprawl from getting out of hand. It allows you to have a view over these different
disparate deployment environments. Tell us why Kubernetes is in an accelerant to
containers adoption.
Christiansen: Kubernetes fundamentally is an orchestration platform that allows you to
take containers and put them in the right place, manage them, shut them down when
they are not working or having behavior problems. We need a place to orchestrate, and
that’s what Kubernetes is meant to be.
It basically displaced a number of other private, what we call opinionated, orchestrators.
There was a number of them out there that were being worked on. And then Google
released Kubernetes, which was fundamentally their platform that they had been running
their world on for 10 years. They are doing for this ecosystem what the Android system
did for cell phones. They were releasing and open sourcing the operating model, which
is an interesting move.
How to Modernize IT Operations
And Accelerate App Performance
With Containers
Gardner: It’s very rapidly become the orchestration mechanism to rule them all. Has
Kubernetes become a de facto industry standard?
Christiansen: It really has. We have
not seen a technology platform gain
acceptance in the ecosystem as fast
as this. I personally in all my years or
decades have not seen something
come up this fast.
Gardner: I agree, and the fact that everyone is all-in is very powerful. How far will this
orchestration model will go? Beyond containers, perhaps into other aspects of
deployment infrastructure management?
Christiansen: Let’s examine the next step. It could be a code snippet. Or if you are
familiar with functions, or with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda [serverless
functions], you are talking about that. That would be the next step of how orchestration –
it allows anyone to just run code only. I don’t care about a container. I don’t care about
the networking. I don’t care about any of that stuff -- just execute my code.
Kubernetes has become a de facto
industry standard. We have not seen a
technology platform gain acceptance in
the ecosystem as fast as this.

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Gardner: So functions-as-a-service (FaaS) and serverless get people used to that idea.
Maybe you don’t want to buy into one particular serverless approach versus another, but
we are starting to see that idea of much more flexibility in how services can be
configured and deployed -- not based on a platform, an OS, or even a cloud.
Containers’ tipping point
Christiansen: Yes, you nailed it. If you think about the stepping stones to get across
this space, it’s a dynamic fluid space. Containers are becoming, I bet, the next level of
abstraction and virtualization that’s necessary for the evolution of application
development to go faster. That’s a given, I think, right now.
Malcolm Gladwell talked about tipping points. Well, I think we have hit the tipping point
on containers. This is going to happen. It may take a while before the ecosystem
changes over. If you put the strategy together, if you are a decision-maker, you are
making decisions about what to do. Now your container strategy matters. It matters now,
not a year from now, not two years from now. It matters now.
Learn More About
Cloud and Container Trends
Gardner: The flexibility that containers and Kubernetes give us refocuses the emphasis
of how to do IT. It means that you are going to be thinking about management and you
are going to be thinking about economics and automation. As such, you are thinking at a
higher abstraction than just developing and deploying applications and then attaching
and integrating data points to them.
How does this higher abstraction of managing a hybrid estate benefit organizations
when they are released from the earlier dependencies?
Christiansen: That’s a great
question. I believe we are moving
into a state where you cannot run
platforms with manual systems, or
ticketing-based systems. That type of
thing. You cannot do that, right? We
have so many systems and so much
interoperability between the systems,
that there has to be some sort of
anatomic or artificial intelligence (AI)-based platforms that are going to make the
workflow move for you.
There will still be someone to make a decision. Let’s say a ticket goes through, and it
says, “Hey, there is the problem.” Someone approves it, and then a workflow will
We have so many systems and so much
interoperability between the systems,
that there has to be some sort of
anatomic or artificial intelligence-based
platforms that are going to make the
workflow move for you.

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naturally happen behind that. These are the evolutions, and containers allow you to
continue to remove the pieces that cause you problems.
Right now we have big, hairy IT operations problems. We have a hard time nailing down
where they are. The more you can start breaking these apart and start looking at your
hotspots of areas that have problems, you can be more specifically focused on solving
those. Then you can start using some intelligence behind it, some actual workload
intelligence, to make that happen.
Gardner: The good news is we have lots of new flexibility, with microservices, very
discrete approaches to combining them into services, workflows, and processes. The
bad news is we have all that flexibility across all of those variables.
Auspiciously we are also seeing a lot of interest and emphasis in what’s called AIOps,
AI-driven IT operations. How do we now rationalize what containers do, but keep that
from getting out of hand? Can we start using programmatic and algorithmic approaches?
What you are seeing when we combine AIOps and containers?
Simplify your stack
Christiansen: That’s like what happens when I mix oranges with apples. It’s kind of an
interesting dilemma. But I can see why people want to say, “Hey, how does my container
strategy help me manage my asset base? How do I get to a better outcome?”
One reason is because these
approaches enable you to collapse the
stack. When you take complexity out of
your stack -- meaning, what are the
layers in your stack that are necessary
to operate in a given outcome -- you
then have the ability to remove
complexity.
We are talking about dropping the containers all the way to bare metal. And if you drop
to bare metal, you have taken not only cost out of the equation, you have taken some
complexity out of the equation. You have taken operational dependencies out of the
equation, and you start reducing those. So that’s number one.
Number two is you have to have some sort of service mesh across this thing. So with
containers comes a whole bunch of little hotspots all over the place and a service
manager must know where those little hotspots are. If you don’t have an operating
model that’s intelligent enough to know where those are (that’s called a service mesh,
where they are connected to all these things) you are not going to have autonomous
behaviors over the top of that that will help you.
When you take complexity out of your
stack – meaning, what are the layers in
your stack that are necessary to
operate in a given outcome – you then
have the ability to remove complexity.

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So yes, you can connect the dots now between your containers to get autonomous, but
you have got to have that layer in between that’s telling where the problems are -- and
then you have intelligence above that that says how do I handle it.
Gardner: We have been talking, Robert, at an abstract level. Let’s go a bit more to the
concrete. Are there use cases examples that HPE is working through with customers
that illustrate the points we have been making around containers and Kubernetes?
Practice, not permanence
Christiansen: I just met with the team, and they are working with a client right now, a
very large Fortune 500 company, where they are applying the exact functions that I just
talked to you about.
First thing that needed to happen is a development environment where they are actually
developing code in a solid continuous integration, continuous development, and DevOps
practice. We use the word “practice,” it’s like medicine and law. It’s a practice, nothing is
permanent.
So we put that in place for them. The second thing is they’re trying to release code at
speed. This is the first goal. Once you start releasing code at speed, with containers as
the mechanism by which you are doing it, then you start saying, “Okay, now my platform
on which I’m dropping on is going through development, quality assurance, integration,
and then finally into production.
More Enterprises Are Choosing
Containers – Here’s Why
By the time you get to production, you need to know how you’re managing your
platform. So it’s a client evolution. We are in that process right now -- from end-to-end --
to take one of their applications that is net new and another application that’s a refactor
and run them both through this channel.
Now, most clients we engage with are in that early stage. They’re doing proof of
concepts. There are a couple of companies out there that have very large Kubernetes
installations, that are in production, but they are born-in-the-cloud companies. And those
companies have an advantage. They can build that whole thing I just talked about from
scratch. But 90 percent of the people out there today, what I call the crown jewels of
applications, have to deal with legacy IT. They have to deal with what’s going on today,
their data sources have gravity, they still have to deal with that existing infrastructure.
Those are the people I really care about. I want to give them a solution that goes to that
agile place. That’s what we’re doing with our clients today, getting them off the ground,
getting them into a container environment that works.

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Gardner: How can we take legacy applications and deployments and then use
containers as a way of giving them new life -- but not lifting and shifting?
Improve past, future investments
Christiansen: Organizations have to make some key decisions on investment. This is
all about where the organization is in its investment lifecycle. Which ones are they going
to make bets on, and which ones are they going to build new?
We are involved with clients going through that process. What we say to them is, “Hey,
there is a set of applications you are just not going to touch. They are done. The best we
can hope for is put the whole darn thing in a container, leave it alone, and then we can
manage it better.” That’s about cost, about economics, about performance, that’s it.
There are no release cycles, nothing like that.
The next set are legacy applications where I can do something to help. Maybe I can take
a big, beefy application and break it into four parts, make a service group out of it. That’s
called a refactor. That will give them a little bit of agility because they can only release
code pieces for each segment.
And then there are the applications that we are going to rewrite. These are dependent
on what we call app entanglement. They may have multiple dependencies on other
applications to give them data feeds, to give them connections that are probably
services. They have API calls, or direct calls right into them that allow them to do this
and that. There is all sorts of middleware, and it’s just a gnarly mess.
If you try to move those applications to public cloud and try to refactor them there, you
introduce what I call data gravity issues or latency issues. You have to replicate data.
Now you have all sorts of cost problems and governance problems. It just doesn’t work.
You have to keep those applications in the
datacenters. You have to give them a
platform to do it there. And if you can’t give
it to them there, you have a real problem.
What we try to do is break those
applications into part in ways where the
teams can work in cloud-native
methodologies -- like they are doing in
public cloud -- but they are doing it on-premises. That’s the best way to get it done.
Gardner: And so the decision about on-premises or in a cloud, or to what degree a
hybrid relationship exists, isn’t so much dependent upon cost or ease of development.
We are now rationalizing this on the best way to leverage services, use them together,
and in doing so, we attain backward compatibility – and future-proof it, too.
Break those applications into part
in ways where the teams can work
in cloud-native methodologies –
like they are doing in public cloud –
but they are doing it on-premises.

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Christiansen: Yes, you are really nailing it, Dana. The key is thinking about where the
app appropriately needs to live. And you have laws of physics to deal with, you have
legacy issues to deal with, and you have cultural issues to deal with. And then you have
all sorts of data, what we call data nationalization. That means dealing with GDPR and
where is all of this stuff going to live? And then you have edge issues. And this goes on
and on, and on, and on.
So getting that right -- or at least having the flexibility to get it right -- is a super important
aspect. It’s not the same for every company.
Gardner: We have been addressing containers mostly through an applications
discussion. Is there a parallel discussion about data? Can we begin thinking about data
as a service, and not necessarily in a large traditional silo database, but perhaps more
granular, more as a call, as an API? What is the data lifecycle and DataOps implications
of containers?
Everything as a service
Christiansen: Well, here is what I call the
Achilles heel of the container world. It doesn’t
handle persistent data well at all. One of the
things that HPE has been focused on is providing
stateful, legacy, highly dependent persistent data
stores that live in containers. Okay, that is a
unique intellectual property that we offer. I think is
really groundbreaking for the industry.
Kubernetes is a stateless container platform, which is appropriate for cloud-native
microservices and those fast and agile motions. But the legacy IT world in stateful, with
highly persistent data stores. They don’t work well in that stateless environment.
Through the work we’ve been doing over the last several years, specifically with an
HPE-acquired company called BlueData, we’ve been able to solve that legacy problem.
We put that platform into the AI, machine learning (ML), and big data areas first to really
flesh that all out. We are joining those two systems together and offering a platform that
is going to be really useful out in marketplace.
Gardner: Another aspect of this is the economics. So one of the big pushes from HPE
these days is everything as a service, of being able to consume and pay for things as
you want regardless of the deployment model -- whether it’s on premises, hybrid, in
public clouds, or multi-clouds. How does the container model we have been describing
align well with the idea of as a service from an economic perspective?
Christiansen: As-a-service is really how I want to get my services when I need them.
And I only want to pay for what I need at the time I need it. I don’t want to overpay for it
when I don’t use it. I don’t want to be stuck without something when I do need it.
HPE is focused on providing
stateful, legacy, highly
dependent persistent data
stores that live in containers.

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Solving that problem inside various places in the ecosystem is a different equation, it
comes up differently. Some clients want to buy stuff, they want to capitalize it and just
put it on the books. So we have to deal with that.
You have other people who say, “Hey, I’m willing to take on this hardware burden as a
financer, and you can rent it from me.” You can consume all the pieces you need and
then you’ve got the cloud providers as a service. But more importantly, let’s go back to
how the containers allow you to have much finer granularity about what it is you’re
buying. And if you want to deploy an app, maybe you are paying for that app to be
deployed as opposed to the container. But the containers are the encapsulation of it and
where you want to have it.
So you still have to get to what I call the basic
currency. The basic currency is a container.
Where does that container run? It has to run either
on premises, in the public cloud, or on the edge. If
people are going to agree on that basic currency
model, then we can agree on an economic model.
Gardner: Even if people are risk averse, I don’t think they’re in trouble by making some
big bets on containers as their new currency and to attain capabilities and skills around
both containers and Kubernetes. Recognizing that this is not a big leap of faith, what do
you advise people to do right now to get ready?
Top Trends – Stateful Apps Are Key
To Enterprise Container Strategy
Christiansen: Get your arms around the Kubernetes installations you already have,
because you know they’re happening. This is just like when the public cloud was arriving
and there was shadow IT going on. You know it’s happening; you know people are
writing code, and they’re pushing it into a Kubernetes cluster. They’re not talking to the
central IT people about how to manage or run it -- or even if it’s going to be something
they can handle. So you’ve got to get a hold of them first.
Teamwork works
Go find your hand raisers. That’s what I always say. Who are the volunteers? Who has
their hands in the air? Openly say, “Hey, come in. I’m forming a containers, Kubernetes,
and new development model team.” Give it a name. Call it the Michael Jordan team of
containers. I don’t care. But go get them. Go find out who they are, right?
And then form and coalesce that team around that knowledge base. Learn how they
think, and what is the best that’s going on inside of your own culture. This is about
culture, culture, culture, right? And do it in public so people can see it. This is why
The basic currency is a
container. … It has to run
either on premises, in the
public cloud, or on the edge.

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people got such black eyes when they were doing their first stuff around public cloud
because they snuck off and did it, and then they were really reluctant not to say
anything. Bring it out in the open. Let’s start talking about it.
Next thing is looking for instantiations of
applications that you either are going to build net
new or you are going to refactor. And then
decide on your container strategy around that
Kubernetes platform, and then work it as a
program. Be open about transparency about
what you’re doing. Make sure you’re funded.
And most importantly, above all things, know where your data lives. If your data lives on-
premises and that application you’re talking about is going to need data, you’re going to
need to have an on-premises solution for containers, specifically those that handle
legacy and public cloud at the same time. If that data decides it needs to go to public
cloud, you can always move it there.
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been exploring containers as a
new currency and how that’s a disruptive force as well as an opportunity for improving
the way IT operations works. And we’ve learned how IT operators are innovating around
more automation and orchestration in order to take full advantage of what containers
and Kubernetes offer. We’ve also heard about how intelligence and AIOps can be
brought to bear when things start to get scale intensive.
Please join me in thanking our guest, Robert Christensen, Evangelist in the Office of the
Chief Technology Officer at HPE. Thank you, Robert.
Christensen: Thank you so much, Dana.
Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining us for this sponsored
BriefingsDirect Voice of the Innovator containers trends and use strategies interview. I’m
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of
Hewlett Packard Enterprise-supported discussions.
Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your community, and do come back
next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
A discussion on how IT operators are now looking to increased automation, orchestration, and
compatibility benefits to further exploit containers as a mainstay across their next-generation
hybrid IT estate. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2019. All rights reserved.
You may also be interested in:
Decide on your container
strategy … work it as a
program. Be open about
transparency. Make sure
you’re funded. … Above all,
know where your data lives.

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