Empowering application development is one of the foundational requirements of IT. Today, IT teams are being put to the test because of a fundamental, evolutionary shift in how applications are developed, deployed and modernized.
That shift is being driven by the embrace of cloud-native architectures enabled by containerized workloads orchestrated by Kubernetes. The growth of containerized applications has been staggering in the past few years.
Heading into 2020, 84% of organizations were already using containers in production, an increase of 15% over the prior year, according to the 2019 Cloud Native Computing Foundation Survey. Nearly 80% of the respondents said they were using Kubernetes as an orchestration platform.
As noted by the CNCF, “This is a result of organizations having more trust in containers and using them in more user-facing applications. Another 14% have future plans to use containers in production.”
However, the growth of containers doesn’t obviate or mitigate the need for IT teams to also support the virtual machine (VM) architectures that are the foundation for most existing legacy applications.
Rather, the challenge for IT is to support both VM- and container-based application development and modernization. The two development models are inexorably linked: New cloud-native apps have interdependencies with legacy apps, and legacy apps need to be modernized with cloud-native features such as mobile front ends, elastic scalability and self-service provisioning.
Until relatively recently, the model for development and modernization typically consisted of two different architectures, one for containers and one for VMs. This has created problems for IT: too much complexity; too many silos; an inability to create and enforce consistent policies for areas such as security, governance and compliance; and the growth of uncontrolled shadow IT environments, to name just a few.
A single platform
The logical and necessary model is to use a single cloud-based platform that supports VM and container development side by side, as equal development models.
This side-by-side aspect is critical not only because it gives developers maximum flexibility in choosing the technology that best fits the needs of the application, but also because no application is an island and developers often have to write code to address interdependencies with other applications.
The ability to seamlessly go back and forth between VMs and containers means developers can work faster, better and safer, accelerating speed to market for both new application development as well as modernization of existing applications.
For IT, a single platform reduces complexity, maximizes automation and provides a consistent infrastructure and consistent operations across all environments, from the data center to the edge to multiple public clouds.
For IT teams looking to support cloud modernization with VMs and containers, the Dell Technologies Cloud is a fast, safe, simple and familiar path to the future.
Built on VMware Cloud Foundation and Dell EMC VxRail, the Dell Technologies Cloud enables IT to use consistent, familiar tools for both containers and VMs, with maximum automation and consumption-based as-a-service deployment options.
Key benefits include:
- Rapid deployment of standard upstream Kubernetes.
- Ability to host virtualized and containerized applications within the same infrastructure.
- Ability to extend your team’s existing skill set to perform Kubernetes administration.
- Streamlined IT operations though automated lifecycle management for private cloud infrastructure.
- Consistent infrastructure and operations across public and private cloud.
Conclusion
If you are in IT and responsible for supporting application modernization, you have to be able to support containerized development. With Dell Technologies Cloud, the path to supporting both VM and container architectures in the same platform is fast, simple and straightforward, maximizing flexibility and minimizing risk. To find out more, please visit Dell Technologies.
