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Container technology and work organization

Redistribution

Article from ADMIN 33/2016

By Udo Seidel

DevOps and container technology often appear together. If you have one of them, you get the other automatically. However, as the following plea for reason shows, it isn't always that simple.

Some people consider container systems like Docker [1] a new form of virtualization – a natural continuation of KVM [2], Xen [3], VMware [4], Hyper-V [5], and the Zones concept in Solaris [6]. For others, containers are successors of the Java Runtime Environment [7].

Some see the new technology as a new packaging format for applications. Containers are thus a bit like an enhanced version of DEB, RPM, or even TAR archives. Another perspective simply views the technology as a set of additional processes and configurations that allow better resource management. If you have had success virtualizing something, you would assume that it would be easy to move on into containerization.

But it doesn't always work that way, and the devil isn't just in the details. Three major issues continue to challenge the move to containers: IT security, operations, and human resources.

Security

A question mark hovers over security in the container world. Typical questions from IT security officers include: Where are the container images stored? How are the images protected against manipulation? How can security vulnerabilities be identified, and how can they be closed? How can sensitive data be secured against spying or unwanted changes? What about multiclient capability? What precautions protect the run-time environment?

The list of questions could go on forever. The search for answers almost always shows that container technology is still rather new. New projects do have an answer to some of the questions; sometimes there are

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