Containers: Best Practices and Data Management Services

DevOps and microservices architectures are said to deliver project nirvana, promising faster time to market and higher reliability. The reality, however, is quite different. While this promise is often fulfilled in greenfield projects, in real-life scenarios with existing legacy/monolithic applications, these benefits are much more difficult to realize.

During this webinar we’ll discuss:

- Approaches to modernizing monolithic legacy applications that leverage the benefits of microservices-based containerized architectures;
- Migration strategies, and organizational and technical considerations when refactoring applications;
- A reference architecture for an application delivery platform and factors you need to consider when selecting major platform components, including the microservices framework, container management platform, and cloud native storage.

It is no secret that containers have entered mainstream and are here to stay. Every IT organization is exploring the use of containers. It is easy to make the case for using containers for new applications, especially the ones designed with a microservices architecture.

The benefits of containerizing microservices applications are immediate and well understood. But what about the hundreds or sometimes thousands of applications that enterprise IT teams are already supporting. Shouldn’t they get some ‘container’ love? Can ‘containerizing’ these applications ‘modernize’ them, extending their useful life? If your applications are running fine, does it even make sense to bother containerizing them all?

In this webinar, we answer these questions and discuss a simple framework to decide if you will benefit by containerizing your applications. For organizations interested in adopting containers, we will look at how they can successfully deliver a container-as-a-service to operate and manage these containerized applications.

About the presenter:

Ritesh Patel is a co-founder and VP, Products at Nirmata, a cloud-native application management platform build on Kubernetes. Ritesh has around 15 years of enterprise software development experience and has led software development teams. Prior to Nirmata, Ritesh was responsible for private cloud strategy and business development at Brocade where he led various OpenStack related initiatives and created a partner ecosystem. Ritesh has also held key technical positions at Trapeze Networks, Nortel and Motorola. Ritesh holds an MBA from UC Berkeley and MS from Michigan State University.

More and more businesses are moving away from monolithic applications towards distributed applications and microservices in search of the many benefits to be reaped from this architecture, but how many of these benefits can we actually achieve without a continuous integration and deployment platform? How do we deploy these small, frequent changes in a scalable way? The only way we can do this is to adopt a CI/CD infrastructure that is optimized for building microservices.

Key Takeaways:
- Dynamically scale your build agents.
- Model dynamic environments using multi-stage Docker builds.
- Develop in the exact same environment as you build.
- Version your software-defined build environment alongside your code.

About the presenter:
Mandy Hubbard has almost 20 years of professional QA experience, most of which has been spent in fast-paced startup environments driving product quality. She is passionate about ensuring quality through process improvements, test automation, following CI/CD best practices and all things DevOps. She is currently a Software Engineer/QA Architect at CS Disco, an innovative startup delivering a unique, cloud-based machine learning platform for eDiscovery.

Join this live webcam panel moderated by Robert Starmer, Cloud Advisor and Founding Partner at Kumulus Technologies, to discuss the state of containers and microservices in the enterprise, and answer the following questions:

Are containers and container managers like Kubernetes ready to deal with state, and state based services to support Enterprise workloads?
Is the security model of the Docker container revolution enough for Enterprise applications?
What is needed from a management domain to support Enterprise operations of a Container enabled Enterprise?
Is the Hybrid model for container management mature enough to support Enterprises approach to the container cloud model?
What is still missing in the container ecosystem in order to support Enterprise cloud transition?

Robert will be joined by the following expert panelists:

- Tarak Modi, President & CTO, TekNirvana
- Mandy Hubbard, Software Engineer/QA Architect, CSDisco

Brought to you by the Vivit Automation & Cloud Builders Special Interest (SIG) Group.

Attend this webinar to receive a live demonstration of public cloud service brokering, aggregation and governance using the Micro Focus Hybrid Cloud Management solution. HCM allows IT to easily aggregate public cloud resources into an end-user catalog, while providing governance and analytics to ensure business unit consumption is visible and within budget. In addition, learn how improved control of public cloud spending can help you start building a strong business case for cloud management.

Cloud Aggregation & Brokering
- Cloud service aggregation to quickly aggregate hybrid cloud services and publish offerings in catalog
- Self-service web portal access to catalog services for end users to consume services

Hybrid Cloud Governance
- Get visibility into IT cloud costs with show-back reporting for LOBs/organizations
- Policy-based budget quota management to proactively track cloud costs and notify on quota overages

Using the microservice architectural paradigm allows you to develop a single application as a set of loosely coupled, collaborating services. Each service implements a set of narrowly related functions and communicates with lightweight mechanisms, such as a HTTP resource API.

Microservices are relatively small and easier for a developer to understand. They provide better architecture for large applications and better isolation for scalability and damage control. However, they contain more moving parts and are harder to test.

An API gateway provides a single, unified API entry point across one or more internal APIs. It adds an additional layer of protection to your microservices by providing protection from attack vectors.

It also enables support for mixing communication protocols and decreases microservice complexity by providing authorization using API tokens, access control enforcement, and rate limiting.

In this session the followings topics will be covered:
- What are microservices
- What are the pros and cons of using microservices
- What are API gateways
- What problems API gateways are solving
- How containers fit into microservice architecture paradigm
- How to orchestrate and configure microservices and API gateways easily

The user/developer stories for using Kubernetes overlap with many of the user/developer stories for both Cloud Foundry (applications running in containers) and BOSH (running declarative production systems).

Join Dr. Nic Williams, CEO, Stark & Wayne, for this session will be a beginner's guide to Kubernetes through the eyes of an existing Cloud Foundry app developer and BOSH operator.

Dr. Nic Williams is the author of the free online books Ultimate Guide to BOSH and Concourse Tutorial.

File vs. Block vs. Object Storage

When it comes to storage, a byte is a byte is a byte, isn’t it?

One of the enduring truths about simplicity is that scale makes everything hard, and with that comes complexity. And when we’re not processing the data, how do we store it and access it?

The only way to manage large quantities of data is to make it addressable in larger pieces, above the byte level. For that, we’ve designed sets of data management protocols that help us do several things: address large lumps of data by some kind of name or handle, organize it for storage on external storage devices with different characteristics, and provide protocols that allow us to programmatically write and read it.

In this webcast, we'll compare three types of data access: file, block and object storage, and the access methods that support them. Each has its own use cases, and advantages and disadvantages; each provides simple to sophisticated data management; and each makes different demands on storage devices and programming technologies.

Perhaps you’re comfortable with block and file, but are interested in investigating the more recent class of object storage and access. Perhaps you’re happy with your understanding of objects, but would really like to understand files better, and what advantages or disadvantages they have compared to each other. Or perhaps you want to understand how file, block and object are implemented on the underlying storage systems – and how one can be made to look like the other, depending on how the storage is accessed. Join us as we discuss and debate:

Storage devices
oHow different types of storage drive different management & access solutions
Block
oWhere everything is in fixed-size chunks
oSCSI and SCSI-based protocols, and how FC and iSCSI fit in
Files
oWhen everything is a stream of bytes
oNFS and SMB
Objects
oWhen everything is a blob
oHTTP, key value and RESTful interfaces
Altogether…
oWhen files, blocks and objects collide

As a developer security is something you know you have to handle, but that doesn't mean you have to figure it all out yourself. Application security complexity can be reduced if planned into development from the start.

In this talk, experts from the IBM Container Service team will discuss what it means to build and run a secure application and how Kubernetes-as-a-service is the ideal platform. We will discuss how to achieve a secure Kubernetes cluster, how to handle network security, and how to build security awareness into your CI/CD pipeline.

This talk will discuss how the IBM Container service provides this secure platform automatically and cover advanced capabilities such as Vulnerability Advisor.

With microservices and containers mainstreaming, container orchestrators provide much of what the cluster (nodes and containers) need at an infrastructure level. Microservices are left with unmet service-level needs, however, service meshes provide for these needs.

In this session, we will look at the anatomy of a service mesh and dive into Istio, as a popular project.

Istio's components, capabilities and extensibility - Istio envelopes and integrates with other open source projects to deliver a full-service mesh (batteries-included). Occasionally, there's a call to swap out the default choices (exchange batteries).

We'll explore and demo the project's approach to extensibility in terms of choice of proxies and adapters:

* Swapping out proxies (e.g. Envoy and Nginx)
* Running different Mixer adapters (i.e. metrics, logs and tracing adapters)
* Using alternative service graphs (other than dotviz)

Container technologies are currently one of the hottest topics in the IT world but how do they fit into traditional enterprise IT landscapes, full of legacy applications? How should governance and operational processes be aligned to better support containers? How should organizations change?

Join this webcast with Jan Willies, Technical Architect at Accenture and he will attempt to answer these questions and more!

Running a single container on your laptop is super easy, running hundreds of containers in a production environment is definitely not.

Before moving to the production environment, users must find answers to dozens of questions:
- Where to store Docker images
- How to deal with sensitive data like passwords, API keys and certificates
- How to handle application states
- How load balancing should be done, etc.

One option is to use a DIY bare-bones Docker or Kubernetes setup or else use some higher-level container platform that provides solutions out-of-the-box.

In this session Lauri Nevala will talk about what is required and what aspects you need to take into an account when running containerized applications in production environments. He will also show you how to easily set up a production-grade container cluster and deploy containerized applications to the production environment with Kontena.

Presenter Lauri Nevala is a co-founder and software engineer at Kontena, Inc. He is a happy Ruby developer and DevOps guy and wants to maximize (other) developers' happiness by building Kontena - an easy to use container & microservices platform.

SMB to Enterprise-level organizations are increasingly using or considering the use of outsourced IT infrastructure providers to remain cost-effectively competitive and productive. But while the rewards may be attractive, there are inherent risks that need to be understood.

If you are considering moving your infrastructure to an IT provider, or changing your current provider, join us during this 30-minute webinar to hear more about:

• Outsourced IT Infrastructure Drivers
• Common Risks and Rewards
• Frustrations that Customers Have Had with Service Providers
• Case study of a Customer that Moved Their Infrastructure to Steadfast and Why
• How Steadfast Approaches IT Infrastructure Management Differently
• Live Q&A

Getting help to manage your IT Infrastructure can help you to regain focus on your core business. But, before you make that move, make sure you understand all the nuances of your decision.