As containers and platform-as-a-service platforms move into the mainstream, IT organizations must make some careful choices about where to focus their development efforts, mindful of the fact that they could live with these decisions for a long time, notes Wikibon analyst Brian Gracely in a new report.

“Architectural Considerations for Open-Source PaaS and Container Platforms” (Wikibon Premium subscription required for full access) looks at the major emerging open-source container and PaaS platforms with an eye toward the factors that will most affect enterprise users. These include flexibility in building and scaling new applications, compatibility with legacy applications, integration with third-party services and functionality of toolsets. Platforms covered by the report include Cloud Foundry, Docker, Kubernetes and Mesos.

Choosing a platform is becoming a front-of-mind issue for many organizations because of the flexibility, consistency and scalability benefits that PaaS and containers promise. New Relic Inc. found that over the last year the average number of containers running concurrently at the companies it surveyed increased 192 percent.

The underlying elements of PaaS and container platforms were primarily designed for the construction of new, distributed applications, Gracely writes. Some of the differentiation points of those early efforts – such as programming language support, multi-cloud support and compatibility with Docker – have become less relevant as platforms have evolved to similar functional levels.

Today’s differentiation points, at least as far as new application development is concerned, relate more to the ability for platforms to scale and take on services that previously had to be provided by the developer. Flexible workflows and build/test/deployment pipelines should be integral, and the PaaS or container platform should include or integrate with a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) service such as Jenkins, CloudBees, Circle Internet  Services Inc.’s CircleCI, GitLab B.V.’s Gitlab, Travis CI, GmbH’s TravisCI, XebiaLabs, Inc‘s XebiaLabs and Shippbale Inc.’s Shippable. Also look for features such as included authentication services, application services, data services, security services and support for cloud infrastructure.

The legacy question

Legacy integration should be an important issue for many enterprises, Gracely writes.  The promise of improved stability and consistency “will significantly reduce costs for all applications, which is why many companies are eager to on-board as much of their application portfolio as possible,” he writes. Wikibon has estimated that automation and standardized platforms could wring as much as $300 billion out of IT operational costs by 2026.

However, there’s still debate over the best way to accommodate existing applications, with some platforms recommending that they be placed into containers and run within the platform and others advocating for the use of service brokers, edge gateways or application program interface (API) gateways. IT organizations should consider whether applications will require substantial modification prior to migration and whether they can be accessed by brokers or gateways.

Prospective users should evaluate four core elements prior to making a decision, Gracely recommends. These include application onboarding procedures, features to simplify application development, operational scalability and integration with third-party services.

At a baseline, platforms should support a wide variety of development languages and popular frameworks, and they should integrate with popular IT automation tools and workflow managers.

Scalability is a moving target, with each platform making different claims. Rather than attempting to evaluate each of them, the report links to background information from the major vendors.

It’s also important that container and PaaS platforms deliver a set of native services and frameworks to help developers offload capabilities from the application to the platform. These include service discovery, messaging, queueing, routing and advanced middleware services.

Whatever criteria enterprises decide are most important, the time to start making decisions is now, Gracely concludes. Software is only going to become more critical to business success as the internet of things (IoT), machine learning and server-less applications come on board. “The need for platform flexibility will be critical over the next three to five years,” he writes.

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