Container Services

CONTAINERS IN THE ENTERPRISE

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Container technology is maturing and growing beyond the tech startup community and pushing into the enterprise. Microsoft now supports Docker and all three major cloud providers offer container orchestrator services. RedHat acquired CoreOS and plans on using Container Linux for the basis for new operating system projects and offerings. Whether your organization is cloud native or hybrid cloud, containers can often help reduce resource operational expenses. IMT experts build container images and can help architect and construct the components of your orchestration system.

Container Orchestration & Why it Matters

To fully take advantage of the portability of containers and the elasticity of the computational environment an orchestration system is required. Container Orchestration refers to the automated arrangement, management, and coordination of software containers. When building an elastic environment, challenges like service discovery, health checks, auto-[scaling/healing/restarting] and load balancing become critical. Orchestration systems provide solutions to those challenges. The market leader in container orchestration is Kubernetes and both AWS and GCP offer Kubernetes as a service solutions. For less complex container deployments AWS has Fargate and Docker has Docker Swarm. IMT engineers have experience with all these products and can help you build your elastic containerized environment.

When to Use Containers

While containers offer many advantages that thrive in a dynamic microservices environment, they might not be right for every environment. Many legacy applications are tightly coupled with their data, which can pose significant challenges. Furthermore, some enterprise applications require licensing that assumes a static host configuration (hostname, IP address, MAC address). By leveraging container orchestration, it is possible to work around the aforementioned issues, but it might not be worth the investment. IMT experts can help identify where container solutions are desirable.