Containers, a virtualization method for deploying and running software apps, are proving to be an excellent tool for speeding up development. However, development is only one length in the pipeline to shipping product. Someone has to manage those containerized solutions, and even containers require a certain amount of massaging to fit into a working system.

“I don’t think there’s a single customer I talked to who was unaware of containers,” said Deepak Giridharagopal (pictured, right), chief technical officer and chief architect at Puppet Inc.

Giridharagopal and Omri Gazitt (pictured, left), chief product officer at Puppet, spoke to Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, during this week’s DockerCon17 event in Austin, Texas.

They discussed containers, customer needs and the cloud.

Deployment, automation, adoption

In the world of containers, Puppet’s purpose was to help businesses automate, deploy and manage the software they have. Customers ask how they can adopt container tech in a way that matches the rest of their software management practices, according to Giridharagopal. Ultimately, they want to know how to actually deal with containers.

Working with containers requires a certain amount of uplift in the company before they can get the most value out of the technology. “We can’t just shift everybody over into doing something new,” Giridharagopal said.

But, the advantages of containers are real. They provide a lot of acceleration to the development process, according to Gazitt. “There’s only one mode in DevOps, and that’s quick,” he stated. The core value Puppet brings is helping customers transform, bringing delivery from months to days, he added.

The trick is that development isn’t the only part of the process. Operations, security folks and project management have to be on board. Gazitt explained. Customers have to care about what’s inside that black box container.

As for the cloud, there’s a huge opportunity as customers move their workloads. They need new tools to manage cloud complexity. Puppet is working to make the transition friction-free. “The cloud is the big platform disruption of our time,” Gazitt said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of DockerCon US 2017 Austin.

Photo: SiliconANGLE