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.

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.

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.