How containers can become a vital part of the architect’s toolkit

A wrench with spanners.

Much has been made of the quickening pace of digital transformation globally, as IT departments feel increasingly empowered to boost organisational agility, efficiency, and innovation. Yet less has been said of the role containerisation has played in supporting this acceleration. Containers enable greater flexibility and scalability where developer teams need it the most. However, many still find them to be a challenge. It’s easy to run into problems with containers due to their numerous...

30 August 2021 | Applications

IBM finalises hybrid cloud consulting company takeover

A dog in a cardboard box.

IBM has confirmed it plans to acquire BoxBoat Technologies, a premier DevOps consultancy and enterprise Kubernetes certified service provider. 

BoxBoat will extend IBM's container strategy and implementation services portfolio to further advance IBM's hybrid cloud strategy and accelerate Red Hat OpenShift adoption globally.

The heart of hybrid

John Granger, senior VP, Hybrid Cloud Services at IBM, said: "Our clients require a cloud architecture that allows...

15 July 2021 | Applications

KubeCon Europe roundup: Key developments for Kubernetes on the edge

Kubernetes (K8s) is the key component in the data centres modernising and adopting cloud-native development architecture to deliver applications using containers. Capabilities such as orchestrating VMs and containers together make Kubernetes the go-to platform for modern application infrastructure adopters. Telecom operators are also using Kubernetes to orchestrate their applications in a distributed environment involving many edge nodes.

But due to the large scale of telco...

14 May 2021 | Containers

AWS EKS vs. ECS vs. Fargate: Which offers the best managed Kubernetes?

Amazon Offices

To make Kubernetes work at scale, you need a container orchestration tool that automates the management, deployment and scaling of your clusters. 

If you’re running Kubernetes on AWS, you can choose from several options: 

Elastic Container Service (ECS)Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) AWS Fargate

Which one is the best match for your workloads that helps to reduce your AWS bill? Read on to find out.

What is Elastic Container Service...

13 May 2021 | Applications

Extract: Cloud Native Transformation: Practical Patterns for Innovation: Understanding the principles

Editor's note: This is an exclusive extract from Cloud Native Transformation: Practical Patterns for Innovation, by Jamie Dobson, Pini Reznik and Michelle Gienow, published by O'Reilly Media. The book is currently available for free for a limited period of time. You can find out more here.

Cloud native is a lot to wrap your head around: it’s an architecture, a tech stack, an approach to software development and delivery, and a complete paradigm shift all rolled...

27 April 2021 | Applications

IBM continues to look to the hybrid cloud: Learn more about IBM Cloud Native Day

Sponsored The past month has seen a series of interesting updates with regard to IBM's cloud native strategy - and if there are two key areas to concentrate on especially, it is open and hybrid.

This has influenced decisions to the point of significant structural change at the Armonk giant. October saw IBM spin off its infrastructure unit. CEO Arvind Krishna said at the time the decision was the "logical next step in [IBM's] pursuit of the $1 trillion hybrid cloud...

25 March 2021 | Containers

How the cloud continues to support the ongoing Covid-19 response

The increased use of online services brought by the Covid-19 pandemic has created new technical requirements for organisations. Since the pandemic-imposed hiatus of most in-person activities and the accompanying shift into digital life, websites and applications must now be scalable and able to react to demand in real-time to avoid slow response times and outages. Traditional monolithic architecture simply isn’t cut out for this, and with developer teams forced to build applications and...

13 January 2021 | Containers

Seven trends influencing DevOps and DevSecOps adoption in 2021

While many trends are both influencing and restraining enterprise technology adoption, they can all be broadly categorised under three pillars: infrastructure, architecture and technology. What are these trends and how can they influence DevOps and DevSecOps adoption in tech corporations worldwide?

Trends in architecture

In computing, architecture is a collection of protocols encompassing the utility, structure, and execution of software applications. Architecture outlines the...

8 January 2021 | Containers

IBM study shows 40% of IT orgs don’t have skills to match ambitions: What is needed for an open, multi-cloud 2021

If 2020 was the year where demand and deployment of cloud services ramped up - primarily as a result of the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic - 2021 will be the year where more sophisticated strategies will have to be developed.

The reason: to avoid security snafus, vendor lock-in fears, and costly compliance concerns. In other words, these are the same issues which have plagued cloud migration since the first EC2 instances were launched almost a decade and a half ago....

6 January 2021 | Containers

Twitter moves to AWS for real-time scaling to expand public cloud play

The news keeps coming from Amazon Web Services (AWS) during the month of re:Invent, with the company securing Twitter as a customer to deliver its timelines.

In the multi-year agreement, Twitter will leverage AWS infrastructure and services, from content delivery network service Amazon CloudFront, to Graviton2-based instances on EC2, as well as containers. The latter appear to be new developments while the former is a continuation.

The companies will 'create an...

16 December 2020 | AWS