Container Best Practices and Creative Ways to Use Them

THE DOPPLER

Our guest on the podcast this week is Randy Bias, VP, Technology & Strategy at Juniper Networks.

We discuss Juniper Networks and their acquisition of Contrail, Oracle’s vendor lock-in and new pricing changes, and why Kubernetes has pulled ahead of Docker in the container world. Juniper Networks is expanding their cloud capability with two recent acquisitions: Contrail and AppFormix, a software-defined networking play and a cloud monitoring software.

For Randy, containers are the most exciting part of cloud computing right now. The Openstack movement is slowing down and there is fatigue because people are starting to realize that public cloud is going to win. Private infrastructures that still do exist (such as VMWare) come with too much complexity from set-up to organizing and managing. People are deciding to leapfrog past those now and going straight to containers. They want to pair containers with things like Contrail because the combination allows for a robust infrastructure that can run on both private and public cloud. An example of this is a recent Riot Games blogpost about streaming video games and shows how they combine container orchestration systems with Contrail to give themselves a true hybrid cloud solution at the container level. This means developers do not need to worry about what infrastructure they are running on.

In the news recently, Oracle doubled their license fees to run in AWS. As enterprises are migrating to the cloud, they have a lot of Oracle software currently running in their enterprise and are looking to bring licenses and run Oracle in the cloud, so now they’re being asked to pay more for that migration. This could lead to acceleration of companies leaving Oracle because of the higher prices. People are fed up with proprietary software, licensing, and vendor lock-in. Ten years ago, there weren’t a lot of alternatives to Oracle for relational databases. Now there are lots from Aurora, and RDS and Redshift on Amazon. The problem is, a typical enterprise built a lot of procedures and triggers in the applications that run in the Oracle database ten years ago. Now they either have to ditch all of that or rewrite it, which can be risky, or they can pay more for Oracle licenses and stay with it.

Oracle does not have a good cloud play yet, though they are trying. They do still need to upkeep the legacy databases for enterprises now as the transition occurs. Perhaps if oracle could remain reasonable on pricing, they would have more of a chance of surviving, but it seems the recent news makes it easier for customers to decide to leave. They may need to start skating further ahead of the puck soon if they want to weather the cloud disruption.

We also discuss Docker and why Kubernetes has taken the lead for container software in recent years. Docker took off because it was the “Easy Button” for application developers who did not want to learn Chef or Puppet. Then they tried to each Infrastructure teams who did not know what containers were, so they tried to add complexity to make containers look like nextgen virtual machines. That is not how app developers viewed them, and now Kubernetes has become more preferred. Most Openstack startups have bet on Kubernetes. Docker has built a big platform that has not found its killer app yet and are no longer able to take advantage over the dominance they once had. Docker acquired a lot of companies and linked together a lot of different technologies along the way, always adding layers of complexity. Kubernetes is in front because it has simplified everything and that is what developers want right now.

For an enterprise who is moving to Docker, Randy provides tips and warnings.

1. Work with a container vendor that is thinking about the future and making it easy on their app developers.
2. View containers more as application-centric than infrastructure-centric.
3. Containers by themselves are not going to solve the problem, they need to work with a set of other related services.

It won’t be easy, and be wary of anyone who tells you all the problems with containers are completely solved. Use DevOps and have an application-centric model, so you can focus on velocity.

News Covered The Register: Oracle effectively doubles licence fees to run its stuff in AWS