For most enterprises simply trying to create applications and compete in the new software as a service market, the process of building infrastructure and moving into the container world is a daunting task. Companies like Red Hat Inc. are simplifying this process by providing all the necessary tools, allowing customers to focus on their business instead of the building blocks that get them there.

“Most of our customers at this point are just beginning to move into the container world. … Getting them from that step to the step of Kubernetes [container orchestration management] or … OpenShift [container-based software deployment platform] is a big leap,” said Dan Walsh (pictured), consulting engineer at Red Hat Inc.

Walsh spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Austin, Texas. They discussed the intricacies of containerization and how Red Hat implements these tools to assist enterprise customers. (* Disclosure below.)

Enabling app prioritization at the enterprise level

Red Hat bet on container system Kubernetes early on as the best partner for enabling customers to rapidly deploy applications, feeling it had the most long-term potential. “We decided to … build our own [container runtime interface], and we called it CRI-O. The plan was to build a very minimalist daemon that could support Kubernetes and Kubernetes alone,” Walsh said.

Walsh and his team attacked the task of building a container from the ground up.  “I need a standard container image format … the ability to pull an image from a container registry to the host … to take that container image and put it on disk … [and] to launch an [Open Container Initiative] runtime.”

The Red Hat team developed this process and complementary tools necessary to its function around Kubernetes.

Among their priorities, customers at Red Hat are chiefly concerned with keeping their applications protected. “Most of my time talking to customers is about security and how we can actually confine containers, how we keep them under control, especially when they go to multi-tenancy,” Walsh said.

To balance the risk of comprising the host kernel with the disadvantage of siloed containers, Walsh recommends a combination that doesn’t require abandoning all virtual machines in favor of containers. “There’s nothing to say you can’t run your containers inside of separate VMs inside of separate physical machines. … You can build up these really high levels of security based on containers, virtualization and physical hardware,” he said.

Ultimately, Walsh hopes that his customers will leave the container work to his team and focus more on the successful development of their applications. “That’s the beauty of OpenShift; you can set up OpenShift workloads in such a way that … you don’t have to understand what it means to build a container,” he said.

Walsh and the Red Hat team continue to work with the open-source community to make containers better and further constrain processes so customers can prioritize their apps and higher orchestration levels. “If you know what’s going on at the host level, then I haven’t done my job,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE