Running Containers and Kubernetes for Production. Are you Ready?


According to a recent study by Gartner, the container ecosystem is immature and lacks operational best practices. But adoption of containers and Kubernetes is increasing for legacy modernization and cloud-native applications.

By 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 30% today.

Key Challenges facing Business include:
  • Container usage for production deployments in enterprises is still constrained by concerns regarding security, monitoring, data management and networking.
  • Cloud-native applications require a high degree of infrastructure automation and specialized operations skills, which are not commonly found in enterprise IT organizations.
  • Identifying, creating and empowering the right team is challenging, due to legacy mindsets and operational burdens on team members.
  • There is a hodgepodge of competing vendor interests, uncertain monetization strategies and varied consumption models. This makes vendor selection more difficult, poses serious questions about the commitment of large vendors and affects the viability of startups in the container space.

Recommendations:
  • Create a container platform strategy that applies best practices across security, governance monitoring, storage, networking, container life cycle management and container orchestration.
  • Start with small, simple use cases; ensure that containers are stateless and immutable; and enforce standardization, automation and federation of clusters for easier management and rapid scalability.
  • Integrate container as a service or platform with continuous integration/continuous delivery, security and operational tools, then augment it with best-of-breed tooling that enables I&O to meet business SLAs and simplify developer workflow.
  • Create a platform ops team that works with application developers for platform selection and operations and is focused on continuous improvement to meet the required business SLAs of production applications.


Although there’s growing interest in and rapid adoption of containers, running them in production requires a steep learning curve, due to technological immaturity and a lack of operational know-how. Hence, organizations should take a realistic view of the business requirements that demand containerization of production workloads.



IT leaders should evaluate whether they have the right skill sets to forge ahead, given the steep learning curve. The questions in the figure above are a good starting point to determine whether your business is ready to deploy containers in production.


Source: Gartner (Published 25 February 2019 - ID G00385131).

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