Docker... Challenges to Adopt

What is Docker

Docker, a new container technology, is hotter than hot because it makes it possible to get far more apps running on the same old servers and it also makes it very easy to package and ship programs.

Not so new!

Containers date back to at least the year 2000 and FreeBSD Jails. Oracle Solaris also has a similar concept called

Zones while companies such as Parallels, Google, and Docker have been working in such open-source projects as

OpenVZand LXC (Linux Containers) to make containers work well and securely.

Adopting Containers

Containers are one of the hottest topics in IT right now, but how are they actually being used?

Which container technologies and infrastructures are being adopted, as well as motivations and challenges associated with opting to use containers.

Containers, sure, but...

A List of few companies are currently using containers in production, but the majority are using in development environment. 

Given that Docker containers are designed to “build once, run anywhere,” why aren’t containers being adopted more widely in production? 

Challenges to adopting containers

- Technology maturity

- Monitoring 

- Automation 

Technology maturity

The biggest barrier to moving to a containerized infrastructure, by many companies, is the maturity of the technology. 

It’s difficult to keep track of all of the container-related tools and projects released over the past two years.

Monitoring scalability

As containers are being used more widely in production, the demand for tools for monitoring them is also increasing. But companies identified monitoring as a key challenge to moving toward containerized applications.

Auto-discovery of new containers, and discovery of the services and applications running within them, allowing app-centric monitoring of dynamic distributed applications and micro-services running within Docker containers.

Automation

Automation is another challenge identified by companies, and is particularly useful for implementing distributed applications based on immutable micro-services, i.e

Service discovery tools, are an important part of this story, to enable services to dynamically discover other services that they need to communicate with, rather than having to link them advance.

Use Case

This video to demonstrate how to monitor and orchestrate a clustered docker application using BMC TrueSight Pulse for second-to-second monitoring and the BMC Atrium Orchestrator to add new nodes to the cluster based on the application's increased demand identification

Conclusion

With more and more companies planning to deploy containers in production, there is a clear need for production-ready, stable, integrated solutions that address the key challenge areas identified by the market: Orchestration, Monitoring and Automation for distributed containerized applications.

Thanks to Helio Silva, BAO Solution Engineer, helped me a lot in the automation part.

Sources

Anna Gerber, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Docker.com and BMC Software