Is Your Enterprise Prepared for a Container-Driven Future?

Is Your Enterprise Prepared for a Container-Driven Future? Check These Five Things To Find Out

Containers have captured the attention of enterprises worldwide. To pursue cloud-native excellence and transform IT infrastructure, embracing them is crucial. But how seamlessly can these next-gen tools be adopted? Is your infrastructure equipped to support a sustainable container strategy in the long run? In other words, don’t just dive head-first into containerization. Conducting a readiness assessment of your organization’s foundational infrastructure is a necessary first step.

Why Enterprises Are Embracing Containers

Containers are revolutionizing traditional, monolithic app development by introducing a modern development ecosystem. Their appeal lies in efficiency and agility. Unlike monolithic structures, containers are lightweight, sitting atop operating systems rather than having standalone environments. This feature makes them easily deployable across multiple platforms, with a smaller footprint than virtual machines. They are shareable, portable, and can be deployed and deleted swiftly.

Still, although the Kubernetes community and software are advancing rapidly, enterprise IT often moves at a different pace, posing both technical and cultural challenges to the adoption of cloud-native technology. In order to be sure your organization is fully prepared for the transition to containers, here are some key internal topics you need to address:

1. Team Skills:
   Ensure your IT team possesses the right skills, especially in Kubernetes—a highly sought-after skill in the current IT landscape. Expert IT architects can enhance resiliency, optimize infrastructure, handle capacity planning, and implement backup and restore measures.
2. App Landscape Assessment:
   Evaluate your application landscape to identify workloads that can benefit from containerization. Although containers were initially not designed for stateful applications, advancements like Portworx by Pure Storage have simplified the integration of stateful apps, allowing for the deployment of traditional, three-tier web apps confidently.
3. Data Storage:
   Select an enterprise-grade storage solution tailored for container workloads. The storage must meet the demands of complex, distributed, and persistent workloads without becoming a bottleneck. Look for attributes such as performance, availability, support for multiple platforms, automation, support for file and block storage, cloud-native design, and standardized integrations with container runtime engines.
4. Orchestration:
   Efficiently manage and orchestrate containers at scale by integrating an orchestrator like Kubernetes with your storage solution. This integration streamlines the management, deployment, deletion, recovery, and provisioning of containers.
5. Security:
   Address security concerns by adopting best practices, including shared responsibility between DevOps and ITSec, employing Kubernetes-aware disaster recovery and backups, ensuring sufficient encryption for critical workloads, and implementing real-time monitoring solutions with advanced log analytics.

Once you have thoroughly considered and answered these five items, you will have a sense of your organizational readiness for a containerization strategy. Then what?

Portworx Enterprise by Pure Storage is a brilliant next step. Portworx Enterprise offers a comprehensive solution that helps you align with the evolving IT landscape, address any organizational weaknesses, and build a solid foundation for deploying containers. Portworx Data Services provides an automated solution for deploying and operating a managed, production-grade data service on Kubernetes. Their enterprise-grade security ensures high availability, point-and-click backup and restore, and up to zero RPO disaster recovery, including subscription options like PX-Backup for complete application protection. Plus, as a 100% software solution, Portworx runs seamlessly on any infrastructure and comes with both 24x7x365 enterprise support and access to comprehensive documentation, forums, and tutorials. If you’re looking for a foundation to build your containerization strategy, there’s no better option.

A well-thought-out container strategy, paired with the right tools and solutions and implemented by a trusted Pure Partner like TeraSky, can position your enterprise for success. Contact TeraSky today to get started!