Containers have rapidly evolved from being used for development and testing to production. Today, many vendors provide container products supporting enterprise IT production workloads. Red Hat offers [OpenShift], (https://www.openshift.com) an open source container platform based on Kubernetes.

The promise of containers includes greater cross-cloud workload portability, better support for microservices and faster business innovation through the ability to support CI/CD methodologies for rapidly launching new functionality. By pairing containers and CI/CD with public/private hybrid cloud infrastructure, enterprise IT teams expect to better match infrastructure spending to workload performance while enabling end user developers self-service and agility.

Despite these promises, there are still many challenges when it comes to running and managing container workloads efficiently. For example, how can the operations team manage security, patching, and performance of tens of thousands of containers running in multiple locations, on multiple types of infrastructure? How can you guarantee the health and performance of end user applications built on top of dozens of microservices, each updated on it own CI/CD cadence? And finally, how do you manage the cost of running these containers?

In this series of articles, we look at how Red Hat CloudForms can optimize cross-cloud container management and workload performance. CloudForms is an enterprise grade multi-cloud management platform based on ManageIQ open source project. The tool provides all required functionality to manage virtualization infrastructure (e.g. VMware, RHV, HyperV), private cloud (e.g. OpenStack), and public cloud (e.g. Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine). Further, CloudForms offers management capabilities for storage, networking and middleware applications.

Our focus in these posts is to show how CloudForms can address the challenges of managing enterprise container workloads at scale across multiple public and private cloud infrastructure.

We will look at each key management areas, investigate how the product can help, and see it in action with a brief demonstration video. Stay tuned!

  • Part 1: Container Management with CloudForms]
  • Part 2: Container Management with CloudForms – Operational Efficiency
  • Part 3: Container Management with CloudForms – Service Health
  • Part 4: Container Management with CloudForms – Security & Compliance
  • Part 5: Container Management with CloudForms – Financial Management