A Glimpse at the Future of Containers in the Enterprise

As interest in containers continues to grow, industry experts gathered at the Container Summit to discuss the technology and its outlook for the future.

This group of prominent cloud native proponents and container heads spoke about the future of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and what its role should be. “CNCF should be the love child between IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force] and Apache,” said Bryan Cantrill, vice president of engineering at Joyent. Pictured from left to right are Cantrill, Ben Hindman, founder of Mesosphere; Clayton Coleman, lead OpenShift engineer at Red Hat; Jake Moshenko, product manager at CoreOS; and Mathew Lodge, chief operating officer at Weaveworks.

Casey Bisson, product lead at Joyent, gave a smart talk on DevOps and how to make it work. He said far too many organizations suffer from the “it works on my machine” syndrome, where new features may work on someone’s laptop but fail in production. “DevOps is like watching Bruce Lee play ping pong with nunchucks,” he said.

The Container Summit agenda was chock-full of meaty sessions for all attendees, including several advanced sessions for those already using containers and looking for expert help.

Attendees lined up in the Container Summit expo hall to grab a bite and check out the technology from some of the vendors in the container ecosystem.

Are containers eating the enterprise? The after-lunch panel addressed the issue. Pictured from left to right are James Turnbull, CTO of Kickstarter; Larry Glenn, vice president of platform and systems development at HBC Digital; Michael Hamrah, senior software engineer at Uber; Justen Walker, software engineer in DevOps at Jet.com; and Jeff Ashton, solutions architect at Canadian Tire. “We’re going for 100 percent containerization,” Hamrah said.

What is Wall Street doing with containers? This group shed light on some of the practices of financial institutions. Pictured from left to right are Travell Perkins, vice president of Web architecture at Fidelity Investments; Jake Loveless, CEO of Lucera; Luigi Mercone, managing director of enterprise engineering and architecture at Bank of New York Mellon; and Skand Gupta, tech lead and engineering manager at Bloomberg. “We’re an AWS for adults,” joked Loveless, referring to Lucera, which is a high-performance infrastructure-as-a-service provider for financial services.

Dave Bartoletti, principal analyst at Forrester Research, moderated the Wall Street panel. Bartoletti’s research showed that only 8 percent of enterprises currently use containers in production.

Barton George, senior principal engineer at Dell, talked about putting Linux on Dell laptops and then venturing into the container world. In this photo, George (left) tells Bill Fine, vice president of product and marketing at Joyent, that containers are all about developer productivity and operational agility.

This panel discussed how containers and microservices are a natural fit. Pictured from left to right are Bryan Cantrill, vice president of engineering at Joyent; Scott Rahner, engineering and productivity lead at Dow Jones; Peter Elger, director of engineering at nearForm; and Jacob Groundwater, senior software engineer at New Relic.

A panel of container experts hashed out the container ecosystem and what to expect next. In this photo, Jessica Frazelle, software engineer and core maintainer at Docker, explains to Bryan Cantrill (standing) what she likes and dislikes about the container ecosystem. On Frazelle’s right is Dustin Kirkland, Ubuntu product manager at Canonical, followed by Tianon Gravi, senior vice president of operations at InfoSiftr. “I’d like to see more of the ability to have multiple hosts by default; not just single hosts,” Frazelle said.

Rounding out the ecosystem panel were, from left to right, Dustin Kirkland, Tianon Gravi; Ilan Rabinovitch, director of technical community and evangelism at Datadog; and Stephen Nguyen, developer evangelist at ClusterHQ. Asked by moderator Bryan Cantrill whether the peak of confusion about containers has been reached, Gravi indicated that there just may be too much information and easy availability to it. Riffing on Cantrill’s earlier comment about spreading the word on containers being like teaching peasants to read, Gravi said: “Way back when, the Bible wasn’t readable by everybody; it was only available to preachers. And we got a lot more confusion after we could all read the Bible.”