Lightweight, fast and adaptable, Red Hat containers are designed to run across the open hybrid cloud.

Written by Etsuji Nakai, Senior Solution Architect (Red Hat)

While IT budgets rarely grow, enterprise IT departments are almost always expected to do more with less. That’s where container technology can help. It allows you to innovate, deliver applications faster and even create new classes of applications.

“In a mere 13 seconds, you can create 65 containers,” said Mark Coggin at the Red Hat Forum in Singapore. Coggin, the senior director for Platforms Marketing at Red Hat, explains that with this kind of deployment speed, it is possible to quickly provision and configure for development, testing, or deployment environments.

Containers introduce applications autonomy by packaging the applications with the libraries and other binaries on which they depend. This avoids conflicts between apps that otherwise rely on the key components of the underlying host operating system (OS).

Because containers include only the necessary dependencies and not a full OS, they are lightweight, faster and more agile than virtual machines (VMs). All containers on a host, however, must use the kernel from the OS. Hence a VM is a good solution if large volumes of hardware resources have to be used, while the lightweight container is more suitable as a unit of software delivery at the process level.

Macro support of microservices

Red Hat is a leader and active participant in container technology. It is the second largest contributor to both the Docker and Kubernetes open source projects, and backs the Project Atomic community in creating lightweight Linux Container hosts. Also an early leader in enterprise-class container offerings, Red Hat has released a container-centric OS in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host, and recently announced Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform for Linux containers at-scale.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is scaled back and optimised to run mainly Docker containers in a minimal, secure footprint, with ‘just enough’ resources to support apps. It also provisions rapidly and simplifies maintenance, as Atomic updates are quick, reliable and easily rolled back. For Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) delivery to the enterprise IT ecosystem, an evolved Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise 3 natively integrates Docker, Kubernetes and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat also follows a well-mapped path in services delivery through “Red Hat Container Lifecycle Management”, a framework that encompasses four phases: discovery, assessment, planning and designing, and implementation. These are required in an end-to-end process that structures management and defines lifecycles for containers.

Post-implementation, Red Hat continues to mentor, train and collaborate with the customer’s IT team. This holistic approach enables app developers to deliver higher quality releases with better application scalability and greater application isolation. IT architects also benefit with faster scale out, shorter test cycles and fewer deployment errors.

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