The Doppler Quarterly Fall 2017 | Page 46

The State of Container Lifecycle Management: Time for Reinvention David Linthicum Special consideration needs to be taken when plan- ning out the lifecycle management of your containers. The core question for enterprises that are building applications using contain- ers is: How should container lifecycles be managed? There are no easy answers. Few best practices, or even tools that push specific methods and processes, exist. A basic mistake that enterprises make is to manage containers as if they were virtual machines, which they are not. Another is to manage them as traditional application workloads, which they also are not. Containers are different from traditional or modern application workloads. They are self-contained and portable. While they can run by themselves, they can also run in clusters by using special cluster managers such as Kubernetes. They can be distributed, with specific sets of containers taking on specific roles in an application. Thus, there can be dependencies between them that must be tracked and considered during testing, deployment, and IT operations. What does this all mean? Containers are different enough that special consid- eration should be made around how they are managed. 44 | THE DOPPLER | FALL 2017