Admin l Saturday, February 17, 2018
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – Containerisation has been the driving force behind efforts to accelerate software development, move to the cloud, and modernise legacy applications. This is according to an article written recently by Amjad Afanah https://hypergrid.com/5-reasons-hypergrid-is-going-to-rock-dockercon-1-a-full-stack-cloud-solution-for-containers-with-no-upfront-costs-and-a-pay-as-you-go-consumption-model/, VP of Product, HyperCloud at HyperGrid, a Networks Unlimited vendor partner.
Afanah notes that IT organisations are facing key challenges as a result of pressure to move towards agile deployment models for containers and scalable application architectures. These include a largely outdated economic model for IT expenditure, complexity of integration across multiple vendors, integration difficulties between the ever-changing technology landscape and constantly evolving business needs, and an increased risk of non-compliance and security weaknesses.
Anton Jacobsz, managing director of African value-added distributor, Networks
Unlimited, clarifies, “Containerisation Containerisation, also called container-based virtualisation and application containerisation, is an OS-level virtualisation method for deploying and running distributed applications without launching an entire VM for each application. Instead, multiple isolated systems, called containers, are run on a single control host and access a single kernel. [Source: TechTarget]
allows organisations to package software into standardised units for development, shipment and deployment. A container image is a stand-alone, executable package of software that includes everything needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries and settings. Containerised software, which is available for both Linux and Windows-based apps, helps to reduce conflicts between teams running different software on the same infrastructure.”
Afanah elaborates on the above key challenges for IT organisations as follows:
Economic model
Typically, IT expenditure requires large upfront capital and entails long budget cycles across a number of different vendors for software and hardware (compute, storage, networking.) This makes it difficult to know in advance that IT expenditure will help to drive business success and, additionally, sets hurdles for IT departments wanting to accommodate new projects unless already budgeted for. A pay-as-you-grow-the-business IT expenditure is arguably a more practical and cost-effective solution.
Complexity of integration across multiple vendors
Afanah notes that IT solutions are built based on solutions from multiple vendors and that, in many cases, professional services are required at a practical level to fit all these solutions together. As well as integration complexity, the ongoing complexity of keeping things running across upgrades and patches must also be factored in. Much of the efforts of IT Ops are spent on mundane, repetitive tasks simply to keep things going. An IT proposal that provides the entire stack as a single solution is certainly preferable to a solution that requires IT to build the stack.
An ever-changing technology landscape and constantly shifting business needs
IT specialists find themselves constantly required to learn new technologies and re-train existing staff. Therefore, IT needs a solution that is simple to use and internalises new technologies and tools without exposing IT to a further required learning curve.
An increased risk of non-compliance and security weaknesses
We have seen a trend of businesses going directly to the public cloud, for its pay-as-you-go economics, on-demand service and ability to support agile development. This has, as a consequence, left IT Ops with little control over DevOps, with developer usage significantly increasing the risk of non-compliance and security. A solution that seamlessly brings back control to IT Ops, while preserving public-cloud like workflows for DevOps and developers, is therefore the ideal.
In response to these issues outlined above, Doug Rich, vice president for the EMEA region at HyperGrid, says that HyperGrid addresses these challenges and brings together the best of two worlds that separately address some key enterprise requirements. “On-premise solutions give security, control and governance, and offer the IT department familiar tools, processes and people. On the other hand, public cloud services offer agile development and innovation, and provide resources on-demand, with customers paying only for what they use, which obviously facilitates business needs.”
HyperCloud is a full-stack Enterprise Cloud-as-a-Service with a comprehensive set of services for containers. It delivers a public cloud-like services on-premise, making it easy for IT to consume resources and pay only for use. Customers get seamless scale and high performance infrastructure as a service that powers all platform and application services. HyperCloud also offers 24×7 monitoring to deliver pro-active support for any issues.
