The documentary 'Decode: Container Technology' is an open exploration about the rise, challenges and future of container technology and the popular orchestration platform Kubernetes.
Watch the documentary on YouTube
Today managed hosting provider True launches a documentary about container technology and Kubernetes. In 20 minutes experts from Microsoft, Nu.nl, Rancher, CarePay, Twill, True and LaunchAI tell about their experiences with container tech, the challenges they face and the future about the technologies.
The documentary is about the challenges for Kubernetes, an open-source platform which simplifies the orchestration of thousands of containers. The experts share on which types of environments they use the technology (test-, development-, and production environments) and what’s difficult about this.
The Kubernetes experts speak with praise about the possibilities with containers and Kubernetes. "To me container technology is revolutionary because you can run your infrastructure like Google. The possibilities now with container technology, like Kubernetes, is that these technologies are widely available for small companies and every developer", says Lennard Eijsackers, Data Engineer at CarePay. " In our development team we have a development environment spinned up within a few minutes. With container technology you can run all your tools very isolated, you can run multiple versions", says Nazeem Soeltan, Sr. Software Engineer at Twill.
However, the implementation for container technology is not easy according to Bram Bloks, co-founder at Dutch start-up LaunchAI: "Container technology is a different work approach. But if your start with container technology right now and if you've got the right people working for you, then you have a lot of advantages in delivering better products and faster.”
Kubernetes has a steep learning curve, According to Alessandro Vozza, Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft. Not only in a technical perspective. “It comes with a steep learning curve so it's not easy to adopt this new approach. And there's always some friction. There resistance. There's always a barrier to adoption and it's mostly cultural.” By showing organizations and companies and developers that Microsoft adopted the technology themselves, he thinks it could persuade developers and organizations to adopt container technology as well.
From an organizational perspective there are also a few challenges. "You have to provision all the individual components that a customer would expect from the container orchestrator. In this case we would be using Kubernetes, which means that we will be providing the storage and the load balancing and other components", says Daniël Koopmans, Innovation Officer at True.
You should start by taking small steps, says Tibo Beijen, Sr. Agile Architect at Nu.nl: “Small steps are the magic words. When something happens, for example, something's running without memory limits and it's pushing other components, then you learn from it. How can I set up defaults? Maybe I should put defaults on a namespace. I should set up different alerts. By acting on the situation you continuously learn as a team and you're platform keeps evolving. In the best situation this doesn't happen to often.”
A curious mindset is crucial. "You must have some curiosity and enthusiasm about technology itself. You have to have an open approach an open mind of new things coming. It is not easy and it takes some significant amount of your time and your mental energy but it's it's also fun. And if you have this curiosity about new technologies it always always pays off", Alessandro says.
The Kubernetes experts are enthusiastic, but also carefully researching the almost infinite possibilities. "Our next step will be a small one, because we're careful. But it's a step where we'll use more and more applications on the Kubernetes platform. We'll probably do less and less with virtual machine based hosting. Eventually we'll face some problems about scalability. Everything that's too hard or too complex, we'll probably find companies who are good at this", Tibo says.
Alessandro: “This is the time that Kubernetes is really successful, because lots of people are realizing that they they need to be more agile. They need to reap the benefits off of DevOps and have a different approach to do application development and deployment. And so Kubernetes is just the perfect storm for this to happen.
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