For many organizations assessing the challenges and benefits of container technology, it’s about “kicking the tires.” Are the many vaunted advantages enough to move software application from the comfort of virtual machines to the more modular, container format?

“That’s going to be the biggest challenge to solve; it’s not just packing up an application and moving it into a container, it’s actually transforming it from whatever it is now into something that’s more efficient, more scalable, more resilient,” said Joep Piscaer (pictured, left), chief technical officer of OGD ict-diensten. That sort of transformation is rarely without its risks and drawbacks, he explained.

Piscaer and John White (pictured, right), vice president of product strategy at Expedient Inc., recently joined Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during DockerCon17 in Austin, Texas. They discussed some of the challenges of using Docker Inc. containers, as well as some suggestions around shared use cases that would better meet their needs.

Helping enterprises find their way

In some ways containers are a whole new ecosystem, where companies can feel like they’re starting from Ground Zero again. However,Piscaer said it is good to be at DockerCon to get a feel of the ecosystem and to begin to develop a strategy around Docker that his company can communicate to potential customers.

Both Piscaer and White felt that this year’s DockerCon focused on enterprise customers, and that’s a good thing, they said.

“I think a lot of focus [this year is] on the enterprise; figuring out how this is relevant to them in the future is actually a really great way to go. I hope to see more of that. [I’m] looking for those use cases; right now, it’s a little bit hard, especially when you have [companies] like Visa who have been working on this a few years now, and they’re only six months into production,” said White.

In some ways, he explained, the technology is so new that companies are kind of “crawling” on their way to walking.

Piscaer and White hope that in the future, Docker will be able to present more medium and small enterprises use cases, emphasizing how Docker can work for those customers and business needs and not just for very large organizations.

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