Container technologies have started to revolutionize the way we develop and deploy business applications today. The demand for speed, security, availability, robustness and safeguarding past IT technology investments, can finally be answered in the software defined container world.

A container is a runtime environment that holds all the files, libraries and variables required to run a program. As containers are dedicated to a specific purpose, they consume very few resources in a server, virtual or local environment. Amongst other platforms, containerization can be used within Docker, Google Kubernetes and AWS platforms. Containers allow multiple applications to run on a single VM, which makes this method very resourceful.

For a long time, businesses have suffered under the burden of slow IT infrastructure delivery to support their application developments and market offerings. While time to market is becoming increasingly essential to success, organizations look to their IT for a faster provisioning of solutions.

Obtaining access to virtual machines or existing on-premise storage can still take days if not weeks. For hardware-based scenarios, ordering lead times, configuration activities and security assessments is where much of the internal time is being spent. Two weeks from order to delivery is not unusual for simple platforms. Vendor lock-in drives additional financial and business risk. This scenario is not sustainable in a world that demands constant change, asking for rapid developments amplified by the permanent risk of losing competitive advantage due to potential late market entry.

Ideally, storage is instantly available at the fingertips of the developer:
Software-defined containers complemented by orchestrators, testing and automation suites including software defined cloud native storage such as StorageOS ( storageos.com ).

The latter technology, on top of many other benefits, makes data lightweight and portable. It can run on any platform, is application centric and allows to manage all of its aspects based on the included business rules engine.

Think about consolidating all existing storage into a high available storage pool, combining cloud and local assets including existing hard disks. This will safeguard investments and boost agile developments in a cost-efficient manner.

In the upcoming article, I will elaborate on how StorageOS introduces persistent storage for containers.