Microsoft cloud embraces containers: How & why containerization is changing enterprise IT

Around 2010, solutions developers and forward-thinking companies began to talk about the cloud as the next frontier of enterprise IT. And a similar buzz now surrounds the trend of containerization in cloud services.

Containerization today has an air of "next big thing" in enterprise IT in much the way cloud was considered at the beginning of the decade, says Greg Pierce, Chief Cloud Officer at Concerto Cloud Services in Tampa, Fla.

So what is containerization?

"Containerization is effectively like bubble wrapping an entire data center," he says. "It is something that runs on a cloud. But it can replace components of the cloud."

He says instead of virtualizing a single server or application, think of virtualizing chunks or whole segments of a datacenter. Putting whole portions of a datacenter, in other words, in a virtual container and scaling that up and down as needed.

At Microsoft Ignite 2017, Jeff Woolsey, a principal program manager for Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise Division, said containers are a new frontier for Redmond's vision of enterprise Cloud computing - akin to a whole new breed of virtualization. (At the event, Microsoft relaunched its Nano Server, one that is now optimized for containerization.)

Says Dan Ditmaso, infrastructure architect at Catapult ERP in Vancouver, Canada, containerization, "To me containerization is a solution to the problem of how to get software reliably running when moving from one computing environment to another."

So developers might use containerization to create ...