The cloud services division at EOH has announced, in what it believes to be a South African first, that it is bringing containers to its Enterprise Public Cloud Platform.
Containers and container orchestration are top of mind in the IT world, and for good reason, says Richard Vester, group executive for EOH’s Cloud division.
“Containers solve the problem of how to get software to run reliably when moved from one computing environment to another. It also is a foundational building block for cloud native and microservice based architectures. The container platform will be a key part in enabling the digital revolution.”
The specialist cloud division has partnered with fellow EOH company, LSD Information Technology, to enable customers to access the best open source containerisation technology on the market. LSD provides a number of open source tools, including; Git, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Docker and OpenShift, and has helped many businesses along their journey to a microservices world.
“LSD has helped enterprises set up container platforms in countries ranging from the US to Japan, and on a variety of platforms, including Azure, Google Cloud Engine and Amazon EC2. They have extensive experience and are experts in the field,” Vester says.
He says organisations are looking for ways to modernise their technology stacks but are battling to get a grip on their legacy technologies inside their data centres. Containers will help to solve this problem and allow them to transform legacy applications into modern architectures.
“But modernisation is only the tip of the iceberg,” he adds. “It makes moving to, and around multi-cloud environments easier and provides a consistent way of managing the application stack, irrespective of whether the applications are in the cloud, a private data centre, or moving between the two.”
Containers were made to virtualise a single application and provide a virtual instance of that application. In this way, an isolation boundary is created, at the application level instead of the server level. Should anything go awry in that container, it affects that container alone, not the entire environment, explains Vester.
In addition, he says containers provide a simple and secure way to implement specific infrastructure requirements and are a real and practical alternative to virtual machines (VMs). “Remember that one feature that makes containers so appealing is the minimalist nature of their deployment. They differ from VMs in that they do not require a full OS to be installed within the container, nor do they need a virtual copy of the host server’s hardware. They require the very minimum amount of resources to operate and carry the task they are needed for.”
Moreover, they are highly portable, and can be deployed with ease to different infrastructure platforms. He says this is particularly beneficial from a software lifecycle point of view, as containers can be duplicated without any configuration hassles, to create development, test, integration and live environments.
“Containers are another great innovation from the open source world. We are extremely pleased that this collaboration will help customers quickly realise the value of open source technologies, and also bring the benefits of containerisation to a wider audience, enabling the digital revolution in their businesses,” says LSD’s Stefan Lesicnik.