Learning From 300 Enterprises: Top 10 Priorities for Container Management and DevOps in 2018

by Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director, Hybrid Cloud, Software Defined Infrastructure and Machine Learning

The launch of the EMA Top 3 website presents visitors with the unique opportunity to learn from experiences, mistakes, priorities, and requirements from 300 of your peers. The EMA Top 3 focuses on enabling corporate IT and development teams to minimize operations cost and maximize the time and resources spent on compliant, secure, fast, and high-quality software releases.

The EMA Top 3 products all have one thing in common: they aim to close the existing gap between developers who want to release faster and corporate IT teams who are responsible for security, compliance, and SLAs. Each EMA Top 3 product delivers automation and orchestration capabilities to tie together traditional bare metal, VM-based infrastructure, and cloud-native applications running on containers, PaaS, and FaaS (Functions as a Service).

Digital Transformation at Your Own Pace

In the EMA Cloud Rant titled “Automating the DevOps Pipeline at Your Own Pace." Jens Soeldner and I talk to Brad Parks from Morpheus Data about how enterprises can lower cost and risk of modernizing their application portfolio. As an IT consultant, Jens spends his time travelling to enterprise clients to advise them on how to release software faster and at a lower cost. He wholeheartedly confirms the main container and DevOps requirement: integration of containers and DevOps processes with traditional IT.

Security and Compliance Need to Shift Left

During my conversations with Cliff Turner, senior consultant at CloudPassage, we focused on the importance of “infusing” the entire DevOps process from its beginning with compliance and security by automatically and continuously scanning all infrastructure components that are part of a build. EMA Top 3 winner CloudPassage Halo will flag and enforce corporate compliance and security rules across bare metal, VM, and container environments in the data center or the public cloud.

Application-Focused Kubernetes Management

Deploying a Kubernetes development and test environment is simple. Integrating this environment with existing IT systems, however, is less trivial. Enforcing performance, compliance, security, availability, and cost control is even trickier. The Nirmata platform takes on Kubernetes management across data center locations and clouds to enable the enterprise to fully focus on their DevOps processes, without the need to hire Kubernetes experts.

Jobs-as-Code: Making Batch Jobs Part of DevOps

Batch jobs are still part of most major ecommerce and banking transactions in larger enterprises. However, the team responsible for job scheduling is often disconnected from the DevOps process, and scheduling jobs are often not part of ongoing test procedures. The Control-M by BMC Automation API enables enterprises to tie batch jobs into the DevOps toolchain and, therefore, enables the continuous coordination of each release with the affected batch jobs.

Unified Kubernetes and VM Management

VMware PKS (Pivotal Container Service) is interesting because it offers the perspective to centrally manage VMs, containers, and PaaS through one centralized interface. Ultimately, this would allow VMware administrators to organically grow into the role of container administrators. This becomes an even more compelling story when you consider the multi-cloud integration capabilities through NSX and the ability to deploy to VMware’s own hyperconverged infrastructure (Cloud Foundation), or to the new VMware Cloud on AWS infrastructure.

A DevOps Operating System

Appranix takes the idea of application-centric operations management one or two steps further by providing a comprehensive management and automation solution that looks at current and upcoming software releases in their respective development, QA, staging, and production environments. This is interesting because it provides operators with exact insights of release health and requirements, configuration parameters and variables, release timelines, and the infrastructure cost impact of each release. Your operations guys will know early when there is a future release planned that includes unfamiliar technologies with significant licensing and support impact.