Today’s forward-thinking companies are investigating container technology as a way to deliver software faster. But most implementations and typical container tools focus primarily on the technology of creating and running containers. Now, as IT teams have learned how to work with containers, companies are challenged with how to run containers at scale and standardize and manage release processes across hundreds of applications.
The ephemeral and disposable nature of containers requires significant effort to keep track of rapidly-changing container deployments, manage dependencies between multiple microservices, and enforce security, audit, and compliance processes.
Teams initially resort to writing custom code and scripts to address these challenges. Unfortunately, these scripts are unique to each container environment and instance, so there is no standardization across teams, environments, or stages in a release. Scripting enterprise deployments quickly becomes too expensive and impractical at scale.
Enterprise Framework for Container Use at Scale
As companies expand and scale their use of containers to deploy applications, they need a framework in place to provide mission-critical, enterprise-focused capabilities. This framework should enable these companies to:
- Create technology-agnostic processes – Design standard and repeatable processes that work for hybrid environments
- Manage application complexity– Manage and orchestrate complex application release processes and dependencies between microservices
- Incorporate IT governance automatically – Maintain infrastructure to address compliance, control, security, reporting, and audit requirements
- Get code-to-production visibility– Provide real-time visibility into all aspects of release processes and components, no matter where they live
FREE WHITE PAPER
Enterprise Software Delivery in the Age of Containers
Containers can help simplify and create more agile software delivery environments. But retaining this efficiency becomes difficult as deployments span multiple applications and environments. Download this free whitepaper to learn where containers fall short, and how Release Orchestration and Deployment Automation bridge the gap between the promise of containers and the realities of enterprise application delivery.
XebiaLabs DevOps Platform: The Framework for Large-scale Container Deployments
The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform offers orchestration, analytics, and deployment automation functions that are specifically designed to complement container infrastructures, helping companies manage applications deployed in containers at speed and scale. Critical capabilities include:
- Standardization, automation, and control of complex software release pipelines, deployment processes, and configurations
- Dependency management between applications and between release processes, and release orchestration across the complete Continuous Delivery pipeline
- Complete visibility into the software delivery and deployment status across all environments
- Compliance, security, reporting, governance, and audit trail capture enforced throughout the release process
- Hybrid deployments that are managed across a mixture of containers, VMs, and traditional environments
- Release and deployment information that is easily accessible across all teams, both technical and non-technical
XebiaLabs offers deep integrations with most common container tools and related PaaS platforms, including Docker, Docker Compose, Docker Enterprise, Kubernetes, Google Container Engine (GKE), RedHat OpenShift, Terraform, Cloud Foundry, Helm, AWS EC2 ECS, and Microsoft Azure Container Instance.
Rob Stroud, Chief Product Officer, XebiaLabs, and former Principle Analyst for Forrester Research
“As container technology usage grows beyond the sandbox, companies need to find ways to take advantage of the power of containers without being held back by unscalable, manual processes developed for one-off projects.
Using a holistic enterprise framework will accelerate software development and delivery, while reducing risk and providing deep insights and guidance. This structured approach allows organizations to focus on creating applications that differentiate the business and to deliver true business value rather than writing ‘plumbing code’ that is expensive, introduces risk, and is not scalable.”
Learn More
- Scale Enterprise Deployments of Containers
- 11 Black Holes of DevOps
- Bridging the Gap: Leveraging Containers for Large-Scale DevOps
- OpenShift and XebiaLabs Made Easy with New Red Hat Container Certification
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