For a few months I have been hearing about containers a lot, with Docker as a reference most of the times (some others are there) and it looks like the trend is clear … many developers are moving into this new programing paradigm, many organizations are embracing the flexibility that comes with this new way of packing apps, and then they change the life cycle and integration of these apps … devops!!

In the last OpenStack Summit the idea I got was clear: the infraestructure is going to be automated, as much as we can, and OpenStack is a great OpenSource alternative to do it, but the real paradigm change is coming with containers.

Since then I’m seeing them everywhere: at NetApp we are “embracing” them for our own development, and also to provide storage services to customer using them for their own apps.

Te technology is simple, in a couple of hours I got to virtual machines running and did the testing to write this blog showing the integration of Docker and our storage systems with ONTAP … it is great to see things working at ease.

However, like in may situations, the big challenge is on culture, organizations, … we have to make sure that developers are aware of the capabilities that the infrastructure is able to provide, and play with this advantage for the app development.

And for the infrastructure guys … we have to get up to speed with all these new technologies, we can’t just let them go, because the real success is working together and improving the time to market in your company.