Today’s enterprises recognise the critical importance of rapidly delivering new technology services to customers, partners, and employees.
To stay ahead of the curve, many are changing the way they build and deliver applications, writes Matthew Lee, regional manager for SUSE Africa.
By tackling work in smaller increments, and simplifying collaboration across functional groups, application teams are dramatically reducing cycle times to deliver results faster than ever before. Enabling container technologies is a driving force in this transformation where a Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) Platform is an essential component of any modern IT infrastructure.
Containers started coming to the fore several years ago providing developers with a way of capturing and ‘containing’ their work so that it can be shared more easily with others. Not only has this resulted in a streamlined development approach, it has also opened the door to process automation between development and operations teams (DevOps).
Containerised code is very portable, so development and operations teams no longer need to struggle to maintain identical environments, and deployment processes can be highly automated.
Focused development
At the same time, developers are taking a more modular approach to application design, building applications by composing smaller micro-services. Developers can focus on specific pieces of an application, and use containers and container orchestration to deploy and manage an application as a whole.
Suddenly, applications take less effort to maintain, and can be deployed easily on locally-hosted servers, virtual machines, and private and public cloud infrastructure.
One just needs to look at the success of the Docker container engine, one of the most popular open source technologies for developing containers, to see how mainstream this approach has become. Research by Datadog shows a 40% market share growth of Docker adoption by its customer base in the last 12 months.
For its part, DevOps is also reinventing itself to be more focused on driving efficiencies across the business. DevOps procedures can help developers and companies create and deliver applications more efficiently and in a structured fashion. Even better, this approach can be implemented universally for all kinds of applications.
Enter the CaaS platform
An organisation can deploy a CaaS platform on-premise to provide modern container infrastructure for developers and IT operations teams.
A CaaS platform also enables organisations to benefit from the expertise of others when it comes to container technology integration. For example, a container engine on its own is not sufficient for developing a [container-based] product ready for production. It requires elements such as orchestration, automation, ability to scale, and security.
Using a CaaS Platform approach means DevOps teams can remain focused on meeting business objectives instead of dealing with the complexities of creating a container infrastructure.
Business impact
Ultimately, the intent behind a CaaS Platform is to provide companies with the capabilities to meet their goals faster than before. Using such an approach also means that they can save costs in developing solutions and maintaining infrastructure.
SUSE CaaS Platform includes all the required components to do this in one solution. With such a unified platform, companies can easily build microservices-based container applications that can run in a more agile way and that are optimised for the virtual environment, driving business success in the digital age.