8\/May 2015<\/p>\n
By Matt Barker<\/a><\/p>\n Tuesday the 21st of April was the inaugural [ Contain ]<\/a> meetup.<\/p>\n Hosted at the Hoxton Hotel, Shoreditch, we were fortunate to have representation from:<\/p>\n The theme chosen for the event was:<\/p>\n \u201cContainers – The Journey to Production\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A quick straw poll of the 70+ members of the audience showed that over 80% were using containers – but just 5 people were using containers in production. The theme of the evening seemed appropriate as many consider how to get to production successfully.<\/p>\n Here are a selection of questions and answers from the panel and audience discussion.<\/p>\n There is a general misconception that Docker and containerisation can solve everyone\u2019s problems now – but this is not true and panellist highlighted the several major themes for improvement, including:<\/p>\n The panel were pretty unanimous in the benefits of containers, including:<\/p>\n Adoption of containers is growing, but for many it is only to use them in place of virtual machines, missing the many wider benefits it can provide. The general consensus was that containers are a great stepping-stone to ultimately building better software. As they\u2019re so lightweight, it becomes possible to think very differently about software; for example, containers can wrap a process with its own filesystem and spin up and down in an instant. Containers offer the potential to embrace the principles of micro-service architecture and provide the foundations to make software rapidly iterable, and highly scalable and resilient.<\/p>\n The panel was split on this, with a couple saying that rkt<\/a> from CoreOS would be worth a look, but it is probably not production-ready yet.<\/p>\n There was an argument against looking in-depth at other container technologies initially, asking why you would go with anything else other than the clear market leader Docker, who have a mature and rapidly growing ecosystem.<\/p>\n There was panel consensus that competition is undoubtedly good for the growth and evolution of the market. This will likely lead to other viable container options in the future.<\/p>\n Another split of opinions on this question with some panel members asking what the point of this would be. Their argument was that you should initially be focusing on improving areas that are ripe for change, not trying to tackle huge, complex beasts that have been in-place for a very long time. The benefits of containers also arguably do not apply.<\/p>\n The audience and other panel members were strongly in favour of tackling these apps, arguing that any improvement is better than nothing and you can still get the benefits of portability and ease of development.<\/p>\n Dave from Crane<\/a> likens the process to going on a diet –<\/p>\n \u201cI might still look fat, but I\u2019ve lost at least 3 stone in the past year. Splitting Websphere up, and containerising will lose you that 3 stone of \u2018fat\u2019 even if it\u2019s not totally obvious to someone looking at you for the first time that benefits have been made.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There was also audience interest in using containers for archiving legacy applications.<\/p>\n There was a strong feeling from the audience that you shouldn\u2019t even be trying for private-public hybrid cloud, as it\u2019s too difficult and complex. It\u2019s also arguably a minority case requirement.<\/p>\n Some audience members posited that hybrid public-to-public would be useful, and an agreement that this is an exciting possibility.<\/p>\n The panel said that containers might not directly lead to hybrid clouds in the short-term. But an interesting point made was that just knowing that you can move containers across clouds is appealing to executives and IT leaders, and a benefit in itself – however unlikely it might actually be the case.<\/p>\n Portability is key and this was reiterated by many on the panel and audience.<\/p>\n Notes:<\/p>\n The next [ Contain ] event will be the 9th of June and will focus on Container Management. Sign up here.<\/p>\n Jonatan Bjork has also written a blog post on the event, see here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n
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