Modernize and scale your enterprise IT architecture with containers technology

If 2020 has confirmed anything, it’s that businesses today can’t operate in silos. Their relationships with customers, partners and suppliers need to be built on a strong foundation of collaboration. B2B collaboration refers to a network of organizations working together to plan and execute operations and meet shared objectives like improved efficiency, cost reduction, product innovation and customer service improvement. B2B collaboration solutions simplify the connectivity between people, systems and data that are managing an increasingly complex, multi-enterprise ecosystem overrun with disparate systems, processes and tools. These enterprise-grade solutions are critical to the success of any business. They are usually supported by strong, experienced development teams that adopt industry-leading deployment tools to ensure reliability and scalability of their deployments.

As enterprises shift to drive more operational efficiencies, reduce their infrastructure footprint and attempt to provide always-on and scalable B2B platforms, advancements in cloud technologies are helping drive innovation and faster time to value. About a decade ago, everyone expected organizations to move to the cloud – with the assumption this meant a public cloud. Fast forward to today, most businesses still maintain significant on-premises environments with limited public cloud deployments. However, with enhanced support for hybrid cloud deployment models, industry experts maintain that it is only a matter of time before enterprises transition to the cloud.

What is a container?

Containers are an executable unit of software in which application code is packaged, along with its libraries and dependencies, in common ways so that it can be run anywhere, whether it be on desktop, traditional IT, or the cloud. Containers, which are used to package and partition parts of a solution, are helping drive cloud deployment and adoption.

Enterprises worldwide are taking advantage of containers technology to enable virtualization while deploying B2B collaboration solutions in one of the following ways:

◉ As an on-premises solution inside their firewall
◉ Onto a hosted (or public dedicated) cloud infrastructure
◉ In a hybrid fashion where the workloads and deployments are spread across multiple data centers or multi-cloud environments

Early movers to the cloud started by creating and managing their own containers to transition their on-premises software to the cloud. Some of these early movers took advantage of docker based deployments. As cloud adoption grew, organizations started leaning towards open platforms, that support flexible deployment and support across multiple cloud providers, thereby helping avoid vendor lock-in. One such widely used platform is the Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform. OpenShift helps you manage the lifecycle of developing, deploying, and managing container-based applications. It provides a hybrid cloud application platform for deploying new and existing applications on secure, scalable infrastructure resources with minimal configuration and management overhead.

Containers technology built on platforms like OpenShift, help enterprises to modernize their B2B collaboration applications by providing:

◉ Speed and agility for quick-paced development processes and deployment flexibility

◉ Significant savings in IT operational costs through containerized architecture models

◉ Incremental value from existing software investments while simultaneously accelerating innovation

IBM Certified Containers

You can run IBM Certified Containers on a different cloud service provider’s Kubernetes software, or on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RHOCP), an even simpler, more efficient way to deploy, manage and scale secure, enterprise-grade software across multiple environments.

IBM Certified Containers are available across all of the IBM B2B Collaboration solutions bringing together Red Hat-certified containers and streamlined deployment instructions for OpenShift. These containers, orchestrated on the OpenShift container platform, provide a secure, compliant, scalable enterprise-grade application. This lets you free up your valuable support resources to focus on the more important aspects of building innovative extensions to the core application, helping serve the needs of your customers. Thus, these containers not only help modernize and simplify your current implementation but also help build operational efficiencies and reduce infrastructure costs.

Source: ibm.com