Cloud containersHow to unlock the key to rapid application development

Cloud container management realises development freedomIn a modern environment, where speed to market is the main priority, achieving simplicity in your cloud container management is key to net new application success.

Within the last decade, container technology has overcome the complexity of configuration that once characterised its environments. Now refined, container technology is cutting development time from weeks to hours.

Solving the problem that developers have struggled with for so long, containers are allowing users to quickly and easily replicate independent applications securely with confidence, regardless of where they are run. Containers also ensure software applications can run reliably when moving from one computing environment to another.

Once considered to be experimental, containers and container orchestration have now emerged as highly desirable technologies. Now a foundational DevOps tool for developing modern applications, achieving simplicity in their management is key to unlocking their full potential for your business.

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Containerisation is gaining momentum, and you don’t want to be left behind.In the last five years, we’ve seen considerable growth in interest and adoption of containerisation. Market analysts estimate that there will be roughly 1.8 billion enterprise containers deployed by 2021, representing a 5-year compound annual growth rate of 79 per cent.

In a world where customer experience is critical, there is the expectation that everything we do needs to work instantly without delay while being intuitive, easy, and above all,fast. By creating applications using container technology,organisations can make ever-increasing improvements to the customer experience in less time and with less resource. It’s a win, win. But not all are realising this.

Burdened not only with the overhead of finding the relevant DevOps skills needed to manage and implement their container technology, when speed is of the essence, companies can’t afford the ongoing human resource cost and reduced process efficiency that ineffectual management presents.

When implementing effective management of their container environment, other enterprises are benefiting from the agility to embrace new business opportunities and move at pace in this ever-increasing digital world.

Most aren’t realising the full value of their containers. Are you?

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in nature.

Containers represent a fundamental opportunity to move beyond traditional, slow, and cost-intensive ways of developing and deploying applications toward truly programmable infrastructure without arbitrary limitations.

Beyond merely moving applications to the cloud, containers fully exploit the benefits of cloud environments — whether public, private, or hybrid

Although the benefits are great, realising them can prove to be complicated. However, with effective management in place, achieving container success can be made accessible.

Unlocking the full value of your container environment is key to achieving rapid application development

Container runtime

Cloud storage

Cloud hardware

Secured runtime

Secure storage

Secure hardware

Your runtime

Your storage

Your hardware

Public cloud

Private cloud

On-premise

Your application

Datacom containers service

Run your workloads anywhere

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What does effective container management look like?

Your journey to container success is unique, but common factors exist that should be met if you want to advance your digital transformation efforts. Regardless of your path, effective container management should:

It’s one thing to know where you want to be but another thing to read the signals that exist in your organisation.

• Be responsive to customer needsby providing the freedom to makeimmediate decisions and changes

• Allow applications to grow withcustomer demand without outagesand operational overhead

• Be secure by design that instilsconfidence so that teams can focuson core business outcomes and workthat matters

• Support ongoing deployment,upgrades, and patch management toensure security requirements are met

• Cut development time from weeks to hours with self-service provisioningcapabilities

• Provide flexibility when deploying,maintaining and scaling containerisedapplications

• Support informed decision makingbacked up with expert advice andguidance on how best to unlock thefull value of your container set up

The six Rs approach to your application modernisation strategy

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• Failing to deliver customer value

• Forecasted times to market not being met

• Experiencing unintended overhead and operational cost blowouts

• Development teams unable to deploy and scale their applications quickly

• Investors and stakeholders are concerned with your IT infrastructure security and reliability

• The effort to release a feature is greater than the effort required to develop it

• Outages and remediation work dominate team workloads which are managed through service requests rather than Git

• Unaware that your current container processes are inefficient

• Lack of confidence with an uncertainty of container management best practice and process

• Lack of capacity to run your container footprint, with energy and focus better placed elsewhere

• Lack of dedicated support and in-house expertise to optimise your container environment

Look for key signs that signal you need effective container management

Identify the barriers stopping you starting your journey to container success

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To navigate your container set up, you need a trusted partner invested in your long-term success, who understands the opportunities associated with digital transformation and encourages you to innovate in creative new ways.

When your core business performance relies so heavily on technology, there is very little room for error. Enlisting the help of a cloud container management partner will ensure you get the most out of your container process.

From deployment, upgrades, and ongoing security reviews, free up the capacity of your development team to focus on what matters most to your business and realise greater efficiency, flexibility and security in your process.

A cloud container management partner can help achieve your digital transformation

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Datacom’s containers service allows developers to develop, deploy, and manage containerised services in a modern and secure cloud environment with the benefit of multi-cloud portability.

Our containers service supports DevOps processes, helping developers build with speed, agility, and confidence. They’re built with proven open-source technologies from established communities and powered by Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP). Kubernetes provides application containers, orchestration, and management on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

With Datacom’s cloud containers service, we can help you deliver your applications faster than ever before

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Datacom containers

service

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As powerful and popular as containers are, successful enterprise container deployments require more than containers and Kubernetes technology. They need a complete, robust, and proven Kubernetes-based environment that meets the needs of cloud-native applications in an enterprise setting.

In response, Datacom offers Red Hat OpenShift — a private container platform as a service product with full-stack automated operations by Kubernetes to manage hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments.

The Red Hat OpenShift environment is optimised to provide the best IT operations experience combined with the best in developer productivity — across any infrastructure. The platform includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS, single-step installation, and increased resilience and performance, all in a developer-friendly framework.

Powered by Red Hat® OpenShift®

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Business benefits

Any new technology transition comes with costs, challenges, and a learning curve, and no technology is worth the investment if it does not promise benefits to the business.

A recent study by Red Hat demonstrated that customers deploying containers are realising key benefits including:

Higher application developer productivity

Containers facilitate faster time to market by enabling

development teams to deliver new applications and features

more frequently, and in less time, including across cloud

environments.

Containers reduce the amount of staff time required to

manage, support, and secure IT environments.

infrastructure teams

With containers, customers can decrease time to market and

react to business opportunities more quickly, delivering higher

quality services across disparate business locations.

Growth in annual revenue

Moving to cloud and cloud-native development lowers

infrastructure and development costs by reducing the need to purchase and maintain servers

and other hardware.

Fast payback and return on

investment

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Datacom’s cloud containers service in action:

Protecting New Zealand’s borders

As gatekeepers to the country, New Zealand Customs Service helps citizens import and export, while protecting the borders from risk. Datacom had the key to help make this a more efficient process.New Zealand Customs Service manages over 10 million import transactions and 14 million international passengers every year.

From helping customers to safely import and export, to checking containers, vessels and mail for illegal weapons, drugs and revenue fraud, the ability to adapt to an ever-changing situation remains the biggest challenge.

Operating in an environment of increasing trade and travel volumes, diverse risks and service expectations, New Zealand Customs recognised it needed to continually improve and modernise the way it did business at the border.

Our Govt.Container is a fully managed service allowing New Zealand’s government agencies to reduce their application development and support costs while at the same time increasing responsiveness to customer-driven change.

Powered by Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP), the Govt.Container service allows developers to quickly develop, build, deploy and manage containerised services and applications in a safe and secure cloud environment, helping to reduce infrastructure resource requirements by up to 60 per cent and decrease deployment times down to minutes. This allows applications to be moved quickly and seamlessly between environments and hosting platforms.

Since going live with Govt.Container, New Zealand Customs Service has been able to remove legacy hardware from its IT landscape and adopt rapid application development and release cycles. The result is massive productivity gains, including faster and more frequent application releases from four per year to more than two every week.

“New Zealand Customs’ role is to protect and promote New Zealand across borders while helping our economy grow. We want New Zealanders to feel protected, for exports to flow freely into overseas markets and to efficiently process imports arriving into our country. Datacom has helped us to do this better than ever.”

Mathew BlackCIO, New Zealand Customs Service

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Partnering for development successAt Datacom, we help organisations and communities to a better place by connecting people and technology. Offering end to end modular support to help build, run and optimise any cloud container environment, we act as a one-stop-shop to drive container efficiency.

With over 50 years of on-the-ground experience, Datacom is a global IT company and seasoned cloud container management expert.

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Contact us

Ready to unlock the power of cloud containers?Take the first step. Talk to our team and get started today.NZ: CloudEnquiry@datacom.co.nz AU: CloudEnquiry@datacom.com.au