With these platforms , the customers were abstracting away all of the IT plumbing ( network , compute , storage ) and providing their developers with an agile development environment with policies and controls baked in . Docker enables developers to quickly and easily assemble and integrate many different technologies that can scale and work across multiple cloud or non-cloud environments without a heavy reliance on people manually configuring and managing these highly complex architectures .
2 ) New Kind of PaaS
What the folks at Docker learned from being a pure play PaaS player in the dot- Cloud days is that enterprises are really complex beasts with a lot of legacy systems and far too many permutations of technologies for a one size fits all PaaS solution . Traditional PaaS solutions make sense for some workloads and some organizations but many enterprises don ’ t want to be constrained by the limitations of pure PaaS solutions . Also , not all legacy workloads and investments in older technology stacks migrate well to PaaS . With Docker , companies are choosing to “ roll their own ” platforms with fewer constraints while being inclusive of their existing technology stacks . This is a much different approach than trying to migrate old systems into the constraints of a pure play PaaS solution .
Sure , some companies want simplicity and are willing to work within the constraints of a PaaS solution , but many others would rather invest in customizing their platform to their exact requirements . In the past this customization was complex , expensive and time consuming . Today , Docker makes it feasible and even easy .
3 ) Dealing with Lock-in
Another pushback enterprises often have with PaaS and IaaS is the fear of lock-in . Although there is no way to totally avoid lock-in , Docker just introduced a pluggable framework where a customer can pick and choose any services within Docker or integrate “ plug in ” services from other providers . Some services that Docker offers are load balancing , service discovery , and authentication .
A customer may already have an investment or a preference for a different load balancing solution or have a homegrown authentication solution that they want to leverage . With the new plugin architecture , the customer can assemble in Lego-like fashion the preferred services to meet the requirements of their desired platform . With Docker , companies can build a higher level of abstraction above their existing PaaS and IaaS layers and create the opportunity to port workloads to almost any environment . In fact , almost every major PaaS player has already integrated with Docker .
4 ) Hybrid Cloud Story
Nirvana for many CIOs is to have a hybrid cloud solution where developers build solutions and deploy on any infrastructure . CIOs want to leverage public clouds as much as possible to deal with things like scalability and to get out of
52 | THE DOPPLER | WINTER 2016