Applications must be portable. That’s the lesson modern businesses are learning as applications are freed from their silos and move to the Cloud. The challenge is adapting an application, especially an older one, to the modern, ever-changing environment. The answer lies in containers, a technology for running applications from any platform on any platform. The use of containers is reshaping the development community.

To gain some insight on the container revolution, John Furrier (@furrier) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, went to the DockerCon 2016 conference in Seattle, Washington. There, they sat down with Jason McGee, IBM Fellow and VP and CTO of the IBM Cloud Platform.

Meeting the Cloud as a spectrum

“One of the big things is the expansion of the cloud into a full-fledged platform,” McGee said, opening the discussion. He explained how this opened up the Cloud for a host of new technologies and systems. Specifically, he mentioned IBM’s own Watson and cognitive computing.

McGee pointed out that looking at the modern Cloud means watching a spectrum, from bare metal, to virtual machines, to containers. He described containers as being in the middle of this spectrum, because that’s where the bulk of application development was occurring. McGee also stated that a company has to bring APIs and services into the platform as well.

Bringing the Cloud to customers

The conversation moved on to the customer side of the discussion. Here, McGee spoke about hybrid Clouds, seeing them as the end state where everyone was going to be in. He explained that Docker offers portability across those environments, and how IBM was converting a lot of its middleware to take advantage of this.

McGee continued with how Watson and its capabilities were a big draw for customers. He also saw a lot of draw for IBM’s container service, which ran on a native interface so customers wouldn’t have to worry about setting it up. Briefly, McGee then covered microservices, mentioning they offer velocity but demand complexity in return. This complexity requires a framework and tools to manage.

“We’re working hard to make containers a core part of applications,” he said.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the DockerCon 2016. Plus, join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting live with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE