Next year, 2018, will be the year of Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) as its value to developers and operations teams becomes more obvious in terms of how it supports DevOps. From a developer’s perspective, it is about the freedom to develop in any language, on any operating system and any infrastructure, and the container is the critical environment that developers use.
CaaS benefits
The central store is a library of base images that are supported by the organization. The developers can use these images to construct their applications, then, using a common set of tools, the performance can be monitored and these services deployed.
Operations benefit from being able to define the base images and therefore standardize the environment to match their skills and constraints. CaaS is still in its early stages of maturity, but with more ISVs switching to containers as the vehicle for software development and distribution, the expansion of this lightweight technology looks certain to accelerate in 2017.
DevOps tension
The big questions about the use of CaaS revolves around the roles and responsibilities. CaaS enables the organization to develop the workflow to match its needs and organizational structure. However, as developers demand greater self-service ability to develop, test and deploy these services, the old tensions between Dev and Ops will resurface. Ovum believes that, while containers make deployment simple and could be ceded to development or business teams, the role of IT operations must not be overlooked, as the infrastructure still needs to be considered in any software delivery lifecycle and the concept of SLAs or guarantees will be expected on these services. So CaaS still needs the correct processes and procedures to be followed.