There’s a popular impression that on-premises hardware must necessarily snail behind public cloud technology. However, some organizations are leveraging the latest hyperconverged infrastructure (combining commodity hardware with a software layer) to run trend-setting software like Docker Inc. containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications) and Kubernetes — an open-source container orchestration management platform — from the comfort of their own home-base.

Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences began using Nutanix Inc. HCI for virtual desktop interface use cases last year. Having found satisfaction there, it has moved on to application development.

“We had a lot of legacy applications for the business,” said Brian Anderson (pictured), director of information technology at the College. “And so this past year, we had a developer who was focusing solely on ‘Dockerizing’ our applications.”

The organization plans to implement Kubernetes later this year. All of this will run on a handful of VMware Inc. virtual machines in its Nutanix server environment.

Anderson spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the WTG Transform event in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed containers, Kubernetes, and on-prem-to-cloud portability. (* Disclosure below.)

Refitting apps for containers, multicloud

The organization’s developer is diving deep into its legacy apps, pulling them apart piece-by-piece and figuring out what components go into containers, what must remain in VMs for security, etc. This in-depth knowledge is useful since refactoring apps is often preferable over simply shoving them as-is into containers.

“I would encourage anybody that’s just starting down the road: Get your developer learning Docker and Kubernetes first, because they might want to rewrite what they’re doing in the application,” Anderson said.

BU is adopting Docker and Kubernetes largely for app-portability reasons. It is planning on designing “burstable” applications that can move to a public cloud provider in times of high traffic.

“We’re hoping to stand up something that we can easily move to a cloud provider and still work the same way that we’re expecting it to,” Anderson explained. That something will likely involve Nutanix’s Calm.io hybrid-cloud automation platform, he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the WTG Transform event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for WTG Transform. Neither Winslow Technology Group LLC, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE