DevOps, continuous delivery and the pipeline for faster software development are fundamentally different from traditional software development. It’s such a different approach and a different culture that it can take some time before Dev and Ops teams embrace and trust it—a necessary step for DevOps to make progress in any organization. By mixing containers and their value proposition into DevOps, this new software creation and deployment paradigm can readily foster that trust.
What Continuous Delivery Brings
DevOps and continuous delivery offer application development using containers, providing the required level of trust to get over that hump and move things forward. According to David N. Blank-Edelman, a DevOps veteran and currently technical evangelist at Apcera, the following container features lead to trust because they answer Dev and Ops concerns:
- Containers are resource-friendly replacements for virtual machines, built to encase the coder’s development environment
- Containers are the complete package format replacement, possessing everything you need to run an app
- Containers create an abstraction that enables development and its results to sit in a host in any of a number of infrastructures including on-premise and inside any of several public cloud providers
- Containers are the fastest means to launch short-lived, purpose-built testing sandboxes as part of a continuous integration process
- Containers are the end result of a build pipeline (artifact-to-workload)
- Containers form the boundary for loosely coupled components as part of a larger app or service. Such is the case, for example, when each part of a microservice-based app lives in its own container
According to Blank-Edelman, the aforementioned features imbue trust because they satisfy the following Dev and Ops queries:
- Is the container allocated to use only the resources it should?
- What resides in that container / workload?
- Where did that container come from? Is it OK from a security, coding and business requirements perspective?
- Where is the container permitted to live and run such as in what cloud, environment, country, and in proximity to other containers technically?
- Can the container communicate with only the things it should such as other containers and any hypervisor or other management resource? “If I move the container to another location, do the answers to these same questions still apply?” asks Blank-Edelman.
Though these questions express concerns in direct and simple language, experienced DevOps engineers who have felt the frustration of building development processes and attendant infrastructure understands these are difficult questions to satisfy. Without modern containerization efforts to sustain DevOps, development and production goals grow further out of reach.
The Importance of Policies
As containers undergird DevOps and continuous delivery, policies support containers. Developers input changes and innovations in code to the continuous delivery pipeline. Developers then respond to the needs of the growing code in a nurturing fashion, fixing errors and enabling new features. This pipeline works when automation, together with each progressive step in the development process, lays a foundation for the next step in a predictable and reliable manner.
“Here’s where it gets tricky: First, not only do you have to be able to answer the trust-related questions for each step, but it is entirely possible (and entirely likely in an enterprise environment) that different people/teams will share control of and input to each step on that path,” says Blank-Edelman. With so much collaborative effort in play juggling all these pieces, policies are necessary to configure these steps, address networking and other elements, and control the component parts of the process ahead of time and everywhere along the way.
Policies that make particularly good container watchdogs include those that set steps in the DevOps/continuous delivery pipeline apart, hemming them in on all sides. “Just like having your papers in order makes for an easier border crossing when you travel abroad, so, too, does having your policies reflect the trust required to move from one step to another,” says Blank-Edelman.
