Technology changes. These two words define both the benefit and the curse of modern business. No one wants to reprovision their infrastructure to match every turn or twist in the marketplace, and very few companies have the resources to do so, in any case. The result is a lot of legacy applications serving products and contracts while technology passes them by. Any business that wants to take advantage of modern infrastructure must deal with these legacy apps.

To gain some insight on modernizing applications and workloads, John Furrier (@furrier) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, visited the DockerCon 2016 conference in Seattle, Washington. There, they sat down with Mark Thiele, chief strategy officer of Apcera, Inc.

From legacy to the Cloud

The conversation opened with a look at Apcera’s competition. Thiele mentioned Docker, Inc. but described it as a great partner more than competition. He explained Apcera’s real competition was anyone who does the same things they do, such as security, governance and workload scaling.

Thiele pointed out how customers came to them not just for help running containers at scale, but also to modernize legacy workloads. Customers weren’t just running modern workloads designed for the Cloud, but also taking legacy workloads, upgrading their technology and running those in the Cloud.

An evolution in operations

The conversation moved toward the evolution in modernizing workloads. Thiele explained how the process used to be more effort than it was worth, but new tools, combined with the expanded benefit of going to the Cloud, has changed the paradigm. The Cloud gives companies new ways to support their applications.

Thiele offered that companies make assumptions based on what operations need given today’s tools. It requires specific resources to deploy on specific environments. Now, though, a company can build for any environment, any Cloud, and then define what the job needs. It doesn’t require someone turning knobs to add whatever the application requires to run.

“There’s no tool to buy to make you DevOps; there are tools to buy to make you more effective at DevOps,” Thiele 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