Amazing Growth in Data Requires Innovative New Solutions
As the number of containers within the enterprise grows, IT organizations will inevitably look for simpler ways to configure them. With that goal in mind, Puppet Labs this week announced that its IT automation software is now integrated with the open source Kubernetes framework for orchestrating containers.
Rather than continuing to use low-level tools such as YAML, says Carl Caum, technical marketing manager for Puppet Labs, IT organizations can now make use of the declarative programming environment that Puppet Labs created to configure containers alongside the operating system and virtual machines that many of them already rely on Puppet to configure.
While it’s still not clear where containers might wind up running inside an enterprise, Caum says Puppet gives IT organizations the ability to invoke a common framework for configuring them.
While usage of containers such as Docker are still constrained largely to application development environments, Caum says it’s clear that configuring thousands of containers running on bare metal servers, virtual machines and in platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments is going to be a major challenge for most IT operations teams.
As a result, the adoption of containers may very well force the IT automation issue among organizations that have yet to reduce their current dependencies on manual processes, says Caum.
At this juncture there is no doubt that while IT departments will become more agile thanks to the rise of containers, the managing of the underlying IT environment from an operations perspective is about to get more complex than it already is.
For most organizations, that complexity will be offset by the increased level of agility provided by containers. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they shouldn’t take steps today to mitigate that complexity before they are asked to spin up thousands of containers in a matter of minutes using low-level tools that ultimately do more to slow things down than actually make them better.
