Docker logging has been an integral part of container solutions for several years now and has quickly changed information technology (IT) technology operations when transferring software from one environment to another. Issues tend to arise during the migration of information as software, networks, storage, secure sockets layer (SSL) libraries or security protocols may not be identical. The business world is also noticing it as more than seven out of 10 companies are now investing in container technology with a third of them spending more than a half-million dollars in container technology. While containers deliver reliability, it also brings operation challenges when utilizing containers during production.
Container Challenges
While developers fully embrace containers, they are not the teams that have to deal with system failures or monitoring issues which causes some concern with container dependency. Here are a few challenges that operations face when adopting and managing the performance of the containers.
Container Support
While developers have been utilizing containers for some time now, the IT operations team have not used had the same mindset to container technology. As containers are automated in creation, testing and deployment in such rapid succession, IT operations processes do not have the container support system beyond basic usage.
As containers become more mainstream on the production level, it will be necessary to adopt processes for operations including responsibilities, objectives, oversight, maintenance and operations to ensure that teams are more flexible and quicker in response times when dealing with production and adoption of container automation.
Container Technology
Now that companies are investing heavily, container technology must also move just as quickly to drive vendor technology output. Before container platforms become the norm in operations, there must also be the tools, networking and storage capabilities in production to benefit from container theory fully. The lack of technology is unsettling.
IT teams have increasing fears that the incoming technology will make it more difficult to stabilize websites or applications that depend heavily on containers. It is something that experts urge companies to consider before making the decision to rely heavily on containers. You also do not want to wait too long to implement a container strategy.
While container knowledge is not an issue for operations as most technicians up-skill when new technology deploys, it is the adoption of containers to legacy systems that bring some fears for full-container integration. Learning about how containers work in unison with networks or storage will help impact the response and decision making.
Container Maintenance and Security
Container maintenance and security is also an issue industry-wide which has offered some innovative advancement to containers and system composition. Security protocols, however, had not advanced as much as container technology which is troubling to industry experts. Security breaches are just as critical as operating system breaches.
Container vulnerability will also offer development operations (DevOps) teams challenges as it will be instrumental to understand the platform security breach sensitivities to prevent loss of data. It will be necessary for admins to place restrictions on container accessibility to reduce the liability. Teams must also implement protocols for dealing with sensitive data in real time.
Container Optimization
Teams must also think about infrastructure optimization once container technology is implemented. There is much talk about container adoption for on-site and cloud-based usage. While on-premise infrastructures will benefit from containers for scaling, some companies may want to scale back on cloud-based container usage for applications.
As containers provide reliability after migration, there will also be some issue with out-of-the-box application programming interfaces (APIs) that configure networking, scaling, storage or computing since management of such applications may not yet embrace the use of containers. Finding an application performance management software that includes container monitoring.
Companies will not be able to ignore container technology. It will be up to your operations team to configure a container and run it on your platform environment to gauge support service needs. Your team, when taking the challenges head-on, will find innovative ways to overcome them. As containers are so beneficial to a full infrastructure environment, it will help your operations team when the application platform, dependencies, libraries, files, and binaries are containerized.
Container Benefits
A server that has multiple containers running with Docker has a sole operating system where each container shares the files with the other containers. Each container has its own access to an operating system, so it uses far fewer resources than virtualization technology. Containers also have a set size limits which allow the hosts to use more containers. Another critical benefit is instant accessibility which makes them beneficial to free more critical resources. Docker is leading the charge on container technology, and it will be interesting to see its development.
