Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference

09 – 12 December 2019 / Las Vegas

Workshop: Containers and

Kubernetes 101: Mastering
the Fundamentals
Arun Chandrasekaran
@AnalystArun

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Containers — More Questions Than Answers

How do I ensure developer How do I monitor and

Should I run it bare metal
productivity and automation debug application issues
or in a VM?
of workflows? in production?

How can I enforce

Which deployment model
organizational security
and vendor should I choose?
policies and controls?

How should we organize our How to deal with a

How do I enable hybrid and
teams to benefit tumultuous and fast moving
multicloud architectures?
from containers? technology ecosystem?

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Key Issues

1. What are containers and what use cases do they enable?

2. What are the challenges in deploying them?
3. Which vendors offer container management solutions?

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Virtualization Is Morphing
2013: Virtualization Wave 2
Containers (Second Generation):
• Led by: Docker
• Benefit: Ease of development, agile development,
rapid scaling
• Primary applications: Atomic, horizontally scalable
and microservices architecture
• Primary customer: Developers

2001: Virtualization Wave 1 Containers (First Generation):

Virtual Machines: • Led by: Virtuozzo
• Led by: VMware • Benefit: Extreme hardware consolidation,
• Benefit: Hardware consolidation, cost savings cost savings
(tactical); rapid provisioning, HA, DR (strategic) • Primary applications: Lightly used web servers
• Primary applications: General-purpose • Primary customer: Web hosters
• Primary customer: I&O

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Containers Bring Benefits to I&O and Developers

I&O Developers

• Resource efficiency • Platform

and density independence
• Immutable • Speed and agility
infrastructure • Enhances developer
• Operational simplicity collaboration and
to SDLC process development pipeline

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The Container Use-Case Spectrum

A B C

Lift-and-Shift Refactor Build New

Monolithic Applications Legacy Applications Distributed Applications

• Gaining agility from • Breaking up a monolithic • Building new

packaging and portability application into a
service-oriented architecture
• Modernizing the application
delivery pipeline • Building new containerized
distributed applications
cloud-native applications
on a large scale
• Stateful, but highly
dynamic microservices

Containers are not only for microservices, but …

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Exercise

• What benefits and use cases do you see with containers

in your environment ?

10 Minutes

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Key Issues

1. What are containers and what use cases do they enable?

2. What are the challenges in deploying them?
3. Which vendors offer container management solutions?

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Top Challenges in Deploying Containers

Technology Isn’t the Only Challenge!

Complexity Cultural Changes Lack of Training

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Key Technology Challenges

Security, Governance and

Multihost Networking
Process Isolation

Container Life Cycle

Monitoring and Logging
Management

Data Persistence Container Scheduling

and Protection and Orchestration

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What Is the Role of I&O?
SRE/Apps Operations

I&O App App Owners

Management UI

Policy and Governance

Life Cycle

Logging & Monitoring

Management API API
Management

Security
Service Service Mesh
Orchestration
Discovery
and
and Ingress
Registry
Registry
Scheduling Registry
Registration Controller Platform
CRI CNI CSI
Engineering

Container Runtime

IaaS
Compute Network Storage

Enterprise
Architecture Developers
Security
and Risk
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Exercise

• What challenges do you see in your environment associated

with container adoption?

10 Minutes

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Key Issues

1. What are containers and what use cases do they enable?

2. What are the challenges in deploying them?
3. Which vendors offer container management solutions?

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 DIY

Selection of
Container CaaS PaaS

Platform
Managed
Cloud-Based
Kubernetes
Service

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CaaS/PaaS Ecosystem

Model Description Benefits Examples

DIY Built using Flexibility Cloud native computing foundation
upstream projects and customizability (CNCF) projects
Cloud-Native Managed service offered Operational simplicity and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and
Services by cloud providers time to market Amazon Elastic Container Service for
Kubernetes (EKS), AWS Fargate, Microsoft
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google
Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Platform9, Giant
Swarm
CaaS Focused on simplifying Hybrid cloud/ Docker Enterprise
operations management Multicloud support, D2iQ Konvoy and DC/OS
easier management Rancher
VMware Enterprise and VMware Essential PKS
PaaS More suited for DevOps, DevOps and Pivotal Application Service (PAS)
microservices microservices support, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
development with hybrid cloud/multicloud
embedded toolchains enablement

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Container Ecosystem Vendors

Technology Things to Look for Sample list of Vendors

Monitoring Service visualization, proactive Datadog, Instana, Sysdig
alerting, enforce compliance
and auditing
Networking Asset discovery, IP management for Cisco, Juniper Networks, Tigera, Weaveworks
ephemeral containers and
policy enforcement
Security OS hardening, secure runtime and Aqua Security, NeuVector, StackRox, Twistlock-Palo
orchestration, image security, traffic Alto Networks
isolation and lockdown
Service Mesh Service discovery, load balancing, Buoyant, Tetrate, HashiCorp
authentication and access control
and QoS
Storage Container native data services, Diamanti, Portworx, StorageOS
resource coalescing and
multiprotocol support

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Exercise

• Which container vendors/products might you deploy within

your environment?

10 Minutes

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Recommendations

Plan now for container technologies, microservices architectures

and cross-platform orchestration.
Start with simple use cases and avoid application environments that
have reliance on major third-party software components.
Create a platform strategy by defining baseline requirements for
security, monitoring, data persistence, networking and life cycle
management of containers.
Create a platform ops. team that works with developers and is
focused on continuous improvement.
View every deployment as tactical, given the nascent and immature
ecosystem.
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Recommended Gartner Research

 Best Practices for Running Containers and Kubernetes in

Production
Arun Chandrasekaran (G00385131)
 Market Guide for Container Management
Dennis Smith, Colin Fletcher and Padraig Byrne (G00372839)
 Top Emerging Trends in Cloud-Native Infrastructure
Arun Chandrasekaran and Wataru Katsurashima (G00385619)
 How I&O Can Properly Deliver Kubernetes Support
Dennis Smith (G00383260)
For information, please contact your Gartner representative.
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