Presentation: Containers Change Everything

Location:

Duration

Duration: 
4:10pm - 5:00pm

Day of week:

Key Takeaways

  • Hear a CTO cut through the hype and clutter to talk about the benefits and challenges with containers.
  • Understand the narrative around how companies are leveraging containers to make meaningful savings to how they do business.
  • Learn more about the art of the possible with container technology.

Abstract

We all believe that Docker will revolutionise deployment, but what about the architectural impact of containers? What do modern container schedulers mean for resilience, redundancy and server density? Are we entering an age of real-time operations? Is a second the new minute?

Interview

Question: 
QCon: What is your role today?
Answer: 
Anne: I am CTO of Force12.io which is a new container start-up. We have a product for using containers to do real-time auto scaling as opposed to the halfway VM scaling.
Question: 
QCon: What’s the motivation for your talk?
Answer: 
Anne: Containers and microservices are a new technology with a lot of buzz around them. Sometimes we lose track of both the vulnerabilities and the long term opportunities in a sector when they get hidden under the froth. I want to step back and talk about the underlying tech and the future possibilities that arise from the convergence of containers and microservices.
Question: 
QCon: What is real-time scaling, and why is it good for us?
Answer: 
Anne: There has been an evolution of the physical machines (which has been great), but if you need to expand your capacity, then you are talking about days or weeks to get that additional capacity. VMs is vastly better, but you still need minutes to extend your capacity in a public Cloud, which is too slow for real-time auto scaling. For example, it is too slow to handle unexpected peaks in traffic to a website. You will lose people while you wait for a couple of minutes for auto scaling to kick in, so there is still a massively manual process for operations guys and girls to predict when peaks are going to happen. You can’t just rely on your systems adapting to the peaks as they happen.
Containers, because they instantiate in seconds, give you the possibility of tools than can actually react in real time to demand and satisfy it. You can program in advance how you want your system to behave when a certain demand peak happens and expect the system to cope with it. That is quite new and something that is unique to containers.
Question: 
QCon: What is the roadmap for the talk?
Answer: 
Anne: I will talk a bit about what containers are and what Docker is (as distinct from containers). Why there is a lot of buzz about Docker now when containers have been around for 10 years? What’s the difference? What has changed? What are they? At heart, they are quite simple concepts, but the difference comes from the adoption of a single standard in Docker. All the excitement that has gone alongside Docker means that it’s actually worth starting to invest in the tools that can manipulate containers, because there is now a de facto standard. Those tools can leverage the fast instantiation speeds of containers to do some pretty cool stuff. I will talk a little about the schedulers that are on the market on the moment. Products like HashiCorp Nomad, Mesosphere, Kubernetes, Swarm. It’s about these tools, what they can do for you based on the speed of container instantiation, and what will happen in the future.
Question: 
QCon: What are the takeaways to walk away with?
Answer: 
Anne: I want to cut through the hype and show what containers do. What they are good for. What they will be useful for in the future. Many people are talking about how good Docker is for continuous delivery, and how developers like it a lot (because it simplifies packaging and delivery of applications) but there is something else. Google is using containers to get a massive competitive advantage versus everybody else in terms of how they use their infrastructure.
Most of us, normal people, are thinking about containers just as a useful tool in continuous delivery. How do you get to where Google is, which is a key path to get 70% utilization on their infrastructure as opposed to the 15% achieved by everybody else?
Question: 
QCon: What is the target persona of your talk?
Answer: 
Anne: It’s an operational person. A senior ops guys, possibly a CTO with an ops background, who is hearing a lot of buzz about containers from their developers. The person might be thinking it is just some developer fad, and all they can see is the pain associated with adopting a new technology in production. Maybe they don’t see the advantages. They only see what the developers are telling them which is great for continuous delivery and great testing for devs, but they want to hear the advantage in production. My talk will make them aware of the advantages that people like Google and others are getting by massively reducing the size of their operations teams through automation with containers.
Question: 
QCon: What’s the big thought you want someone to leave your talk with?
Answer: 
Anne: Oh, that’s what containers actually are! And that’s why they are important! Now I can make an informed judgment about when they would be useful to me.
I want people to leave with a feeling that everything is clearer to them and have a reduction in their overall level of stress/confusion engendered by frothy new tech.

Tracks

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Monday, 7 March

Tuesday, 8 March

Wednesday, 9 March

Conference for Professional Software Developers