Part 2: Technical debt: How to overcome the excessive weight of your outdated infrastructure

Containers are the new Commodity
The advantages of UNIX logical partitions in the early days of enterprise computing became mainstream and cross-platform to now colloquially be known as Virtual Machines, "VMs." Almost overnight it became clear that running business applications inside a VM was the default posture purely from the portability and consistency advantages they provide. The VM-based operational model was highly effective at decoupling your valuable and complex applications from your commoditizing hardware investments. Now architects can center IT workloads around data and software without direct ties to hardware appliances and vendors. While VMs have made it much easier to maintain and life-cycle traditional IT workloads, they're still each heavy weight full-fat OS systems that require a level of care and feeding that's not trivial, even in the most efficient and automated shops.

As container orchestration technology such as Kubernetes and container-based marketplace solution support have gone mainstream in today's Cloud computing era, nearly all businesses are finding a similar transformative effect that VMs brought historically. Every modern cloud platform will allow you to run a serverless framework around your containers nearly instantly -- at production grade. Every modern laptop will allow a developer to run the very same containers and get the same experience during development. This consistency and portability in packaging smooths promote-to-production activities and ensures consistent deployment behaviors.

For most businesses, directly managing IP addresses, server OS patches, file system usage, etc. are all administrative overhead that can disappear completely in a smartly implemented container-based hosting strategy. As you find opportunities to make technology selections, consider how agile a container-focused hosting strategy for your applications can make your business. While containers aren't the right runtime for every workload, the friction-free deployment and universality of containerized workloads completes the decoupling of your applications from hardware and OS burden. Containers are an ideal way to enable both aggressive innovation and mainstream application non-stop availability.

Agility through CI/CD
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment/Delivery was once a concept primarily relevant to the software engineering use-cases. The CICD concept automates all of the downstream events after source code has been committed to successful deployment of that change. With modern IT systems managed through infrastructure-as-code and automated DevOps patterns, CICD has become the new norm among technology-focused operations teams. Not only is CICD used to integrate the latest security fixes into custom code, but it's also the gold standard framework to manage software-defined IT infrastructure from the bottom-up. An ability to respond quickly, robustly test, and consistently deploy changes to your environment are now table stakes to operate best-of-breed services. CICD techniques and implementations allow your business to position digital assets with your customers and employees quickly and with total consistency. Defining your digital assets in source code repositories and executing automated build, test, and deployment jobs enables the CICD dream across all IT workloads. React faster, innovate rapidly, and proactively operate with total consistency. Talk about gaining a competitive advantage!

Losing the Infrastructure Pounds
​Every environment is unique and the modernization journey that's best for your business must reflect your strategic goals. Whether an in-place refactoring is all you need, or migration to a whole new platform, adopting the techniques described here will help set a solid foundation to make the latest technologies truly valuable for your business. If you're asking yourself what it will take to bring Advanced Analytics or Machine Learning capabilities to your high-value business data, consider starting by first modernizing your critical systems and identifying what new business opportunities a faster innovation cycle unlocks for you.

Becoming agile with your IT workloads doesn't mean using less data or squeezing out CPU cycles until your applications sweat. Often the most effective way to help your IT systems move faster and become more powerful is to simply use better tools or different consumption models to manage the ever evolving needs of your business.

Jeff Darrish
​Sr. Solutions Architect