Electricity and Control April 2022

INDUSTRY 4.0 + IIOT

How containerisation can benefit a business Containerisation has become a major trend in software development as well as for any enterprise looking to scale its operations. According to Benjamin Coetzer, Director at vendor-neutral cloud infrastructure provider Routed, containerisation will redefine the cloud.

Benjamin Coetzer, Director, Routed.

“ E nterprises are embracing containers at a much faster pace than expected. This is completely changing the face of what hybrid cloud looks like and how applications are being built. Containerisation will become a key skill to possess in most if not all software development roles,” Coetzer says. Virtualisation, containerisation and Kubernetes Businesses typically used to run applications on physical servers. “It wasn’t possible to define boundaries for the system resources these applications would use, which led to bottlenecks. The only option was to run each application on a different physical server, which quickly becomes very costly.” Enter virtualisation. Virtualisation enabled users to run many virtual machines, each with their allocated applica- tions, on a single physical server. It allows organisations to carve physical resources into more appropriately sized virtual machines, with operating systems like Windows or Linux installed on them. Containerisation takes it a step further, encapsulating software code that can run uniformly on any infrastructure. Traditionally, code developed in a specific computing environment would have bugs when transferred to a new location – such as from a Linux to a Windows operating system. A container packages the software away from the host operating system, making it portable and able to run on any platform. Existing applications can also be repackaged into con- tainers to use computing resources more efficiently. “You can effectively run

able across clouds and offer a host of benefits – agile application creation and

deployment, continuous development, observ- ability, environmen- tal consistency and more,” says Coetzer. Of course, all these

containers need to be managed, andKubernetes is the answer. “This rapidly growing, portable, extensible,

© Routed

open-source platform runs and manages containerised workloads and services at scale. Kubernetes provides the framework to run distributed systems resiliently, taking care of scaling and failover for the application, providing deployment patterns, and more,” Coetzer explains. Benefits for business The benefits for developers are clear and multiple. “Containerisation enables developers to control their application runtime environment much more granularly, ensuring that applications can be built and shipped in a consistent and programmatic way. This reduces the time to deploy software into production environments significantly and enables the use of CI/CD pipelines in the software development process,” Coetzer says. “Furthermore, Kubernetes as an orchestration engine lends itself to criteria instilled in micro-services architecture. As a result, developers are thinking differently around how applications are built to scale and tolerate service failure in production. Separation of responsibilities means rethinking where stateful data resides and how stateless applications interact with one another.” When done correctly, containerisation contributes to the bottom line through reduced infrastructure costs, fewer workflow interruptions, and faster development and delivery of products, features and upgrades. Potentially it supports better employee and customer satisfaction, goals for any organisation looking to grow sustainably. □

multiple different applications with multiple different OS ver- sions, on the same virtual machine or physical serv- er without having to worry about one application af- fecting the other. Though similar to virtual machines, containers have relaxed isolation properties to share the OS with other applications. They are considered lightweight and share CPU, memory, process space, and more. They are also port-

For more information visit: https://routed.co.za/

© Routed

8 Electricity + Control APRIL 2022