In a Containerized World, Does the Cloud Really Matter Anymore?

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

• These days, everyone is doing containerization in a mad, industry-wide rush toward what appears to be true cross-cloud compatibility.

• However, enterprise buyers need to be aware that when it comes to containerization and microservices, there’s a huge difference between compatibility and capability.

Back in 1964, media futurist Marshall McLuhan penned the often repeated but somewhat baffling phrase, “the medium is the message,” in an attempt to highlight the importance of the “where and how” of storytelling. To Mr. McLuhan, a film, a novel, and a comic may all tell the exact same story about a boy and his dragon, but importantly each would do so using very different conventions regarding the unfolding of the story, let’s say the manner in which each handles flashbacks. Those differences in turn shape our understanding of the story in unique ways.

Flash forward to the present and among technology providers, particularly those endeavoring to make the architectural leap from premises to cloud, Mr. McLuhan’s more than 55 year old notion seems strangely applicable if not downright prophetic. Let me explain: as a global market trend, the idea of abstraction through containerization technologies like Docker has entirely reshaped the global software landscape, forever altering the way developers create software. In short, abstractions allows developers to write once and run “virtually” anywhere by turning monolithic applications into a series of highly standardized yet extremely malleable microservices.