Containers offer increased flexibility and agility, allowing businesses to quicken innovation and more easily meet customer demand. And their popularity is rising fast: Use of containers to run enterprise applications is expected to triple from 2020 to 2024. As a result, more businesses are beginning to ask what it takes to set up a container environment. Alternatively, many are also seeking to optimise the setup they already have. But despite the numerous benefits, many organisations face container deployment challenges.
Which container deployment challenges do businesses encounter?
A report from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation outlines 14 challenges organisations face when deploying and/or using containers. In this article, we’ll unpack the top five. For each challenge, we’ll offer solutions that enable your business to unlock the advantages of containers as quickly as possible.
1. Complexity
Challenge: A container stack contains many layers. Paired with a complicated landscape, the complexity can be difficult to navigate for those organisations whose core business isn’t container management.
Some organisations want to rely on their in-house resources when implementing containers. For this to work, they’ll have to invest significant time and budget to ensure the necessary skill development.
Solution: A managed container platform is already set up with the infrastructure you’ll need. This way, you’ll be able to focus on your main development projects instead of container platform management.
2. Cultural changes within the IT organisation
Challenge: When making the choice to adopt containers, a company can’t expect its its personnel to become experts right away. A container project involves application developers, operations, network engineers, security specialists, management, stakeholders from the business side and more. Therefore, time needs to be budgeted to allow employees to catch up with the changes required.
However, setting aside this time can be difficult, and it’s therefore tempting to try and fast-track this step. But this can backfire in the form of resistance to the change. Alternatively, a rushed adjustment – even if all employees are on board with the change – can result in oversights leading to problems and delays down the line.
Solution: If your organisation wants to reduce the amount of cultural change required, a managed container platform could be the best option. This way, you won’t need to deal with the initial setup, just the training on use.
3. Security
Challenge: Containers offer both positives and negatives when it comes to security. The good news is applications are more isolated this way, and therefore more difficult for threat actors to identify when planning an attack. However, the network-based security solutions most enterprises are familiar with will also be less effective for this same reason.
Thus, it’s crucial to prioritise security from the very beginning of a migration to containers. But it is also necessary that those responsible for this be well-versed in container security, which many IT teams are not. Implementing a container platform will require changes to an organisation’s security policies, which will most likely involve the use of new tools. Resistance to change could stall your projects by months.
Solution: You’ll want to ensure a safe container environment, but without putting all the responsibility on your IT team. Take a look around at what options exist that integrate data confidentiality, integrity and availability into your container environment from the very beginning.
4. Storage
Challenge: The majority of enterprises deploying containers will require persistent storage. This storage type retains data independently of what movements or lifecycles the containers may have. Many organisations don’t have the setup for this storage type in a way that meets the needs of their applications.
Solution: Plan the capacity for a dedicated Kubernetes container repository and additional persistent storage for your business application. If your organisation isn’t in the position to do this yourselves, look for a container platform that can manage this for you.
5. Lack of training
Challenge: Rounding out the top 5 container deployment challenges – perhaps a combination of the previous four factors – is lack of training.
A common scenario for this challenge is that an organisation requires a new solution to reach their goals of becoming more agile and scalable. They identify containers as technology they’ll implement to meet their application development needs. However, further progress is often stopped in its tracks when the team realises it lacks experience building, maintaining and operating a container environment.
Solution: With the Proact Managed Container Platform , you have a built-in Kubernetes Ops Team. Your business can move forward in your journey toward embracing cloud-native development without having to know the ins and outs of container management.
The Proact Managed Container Platform enables your business to benefit from a fully managed service which allows your teams to develop and run containers without significant hardware and software investment. It also means you don’t have the attached staffing challenges or face the decision to invest in extensive employee training. Want to learn more? Our experts will help you develop a working strategy and implement an enterprise-level solution to suit your needs.
