Containers and the cloud

Organizations continuing (or beginning) their digital transformation need to adopt new ways of using and deploying integration technologies. The aim: to leverage the benefits of the cloud, containers and microservices. Without neglecting data protection...

In modern application architectures, the ability to make rapid changes to the production environment gives a clear advantage. Being more agile has become a major asset in the face of reactive or disruptive competitors.

IT professionals are well aware of this. According to a recent study by Market Research Expertz, 78% of IT managers want to accelerate the application and development delivery cycle through DevOps and agile methods. While currently a third of those surveyed say they use containers, this proportion is set to rise rapidly from 27% to 47%.

By agility, we mean the ability to adapt to continuous change in software development, and to make improvements where they are needed. In software development, this methodology enables continuous iterations of development and testing throughout the software development phase.

Containers & Cloud: scalability and flexibility

Containers and microservices are emerging as two key elements of a digital transformation strategy. Simply put, containers offer a form of process isolation that is much lighter than virtualization. They thus promote portability, enabling applications to run in the most appropriate and flexible location (public or private cloud, on-premise...).

Containerization also enables applications to start up more quickly, automatically adapting cloud resources to demand. In addition, DevOps maximizes the benefits of containerization by providing the flexibility, portability and efficiency required for a time-to-market policy .

Containers also make it possible to create a common set of building blocks that can be reused at any stage of development to recreate identical environments for development, testing, staging and production, thus extending the concept of "write once, deploy anywhere".

This architecture offers an agility not achievable with VMs. What's more, containers support a more flexible model when it comes to compute and memory resources, and they enable resource-breaking modes so that applications can consume more resources, if necessary, within defined limits. In other words, containers offer scalability and flexibility that you can't get by running an application on a virtual machine.

Dear legacy

Microservices reduce complexity by treating software as small, digestible, agile pieces of code, delivered as a "service" rather than as a traditional software program. Microservices are increasingly replacing legacy software, which is costly and difficult to manage.

Coupled with the cloud, these two links are essential to becoming more agile. Not only do they speed up the release of new software, but they can also help reduce the complexity of software code, which is all too often at the root of security flaws.

While speed, agility and flexibility are the main promises of containerization with DevOps, security must remain an essential factor. Hence the DevSecOps culture, which integrates security into application development from the outset and throughout the lifecycle of a containerized application.

So it's vital to implement the right security policy! When it comes to managing the new risks associated with containers, many security teams adopt one of two approaches: ignore the issue, or address it with a security solution. Both approaches fail to guarantee a sufficient level of protection.

Migration in several stages

From a security point of view, the true value of containers and microservices can only be achieved when they are secured as part of an overall standards-based cloud security strategy. It is essential that the security team focuses on detecting and correcting known vulnerabilities, as well as identifying new ones (also known as "0-day" vulnerabilities).

Ultimately, containerization results in what Microsoft calls Cloud Optimized applications. By dividing complex software into several independent modules, the transition to the Cloud is more efficient and runs more smoothly. It also enables software to be migrated in several stages, without affecting the application code.

But there can be no agility without security.