Debunking Common Myths of Cloud Development: Compatibility & Interoperability
Though software development in the cloud is quickly becoming the norm, it’s still shrouded in misconceptions. In part 3 of this series, we’re diving deeper into some common myths around cloud development, turning to compatibility.
Myth: Container Development is Incompatible with Legacy Apps.
As enterprises move their apps to the cloud, developers have turned to containers for portability, scalability, and consistency across the continuous delivery continuum, from development to infrastructure. By enabling developer workspaces that are collaborative, constraint-free, and distributed, containers are quickly becoming the default for building modern applications.
However, there’s an assumption that if you’re using containers, you must be using stateless microservices. Therefore, legacy apps — which are not stateless microservices, and not specifically written for containerized environments — can’t be containerized. For most enterprises, which run on legacy systems and apps, this misconception has presented a false hurdle to container adoption.
This myth is proven false by the demo Red Hat showed for containerizing legacy apps during their Red Hat Summit keynote demo. Similarly, Codenvy specializes in containerized developer workspaces for large enterprises, many of whom run legacy apps. Containerizing these apps, even if only at the development and integration testing stages can significantly accelerate the DevOps processes and the transition to the cloud.
The Container Revolution in the Enterprise
For tools, containers provide disposable, reusable units that modularize the delivery pipeline. For environments, they extend the write once, deploy anywhere abstraction to infrastructure. While legacy apps often face maintenance and operational issues, containers enable enterprise teams to make more efficient use of development resources and processes.
Using a containerized developer workspace, even for legacy apps, often makes more sense than developing in a VM. The latter requires more resources, is slower to start/stop, and its recipe can’t be easily added to the source code repository. Containers allow all these benefits that developers need, with the flexibility to run in production on either containers or VMs.
Alongside compatibility, interoperability is also a concern for enterprises looking to adopt containers in the era of BYOD. Each developer has a specific device, editor, and language preference, so across a team of 50 developers it’s not uncommon to find 50 variations of the development stack. This lack of consistency is at the heart of the “…but it works on my machine” problem that plagues nearly every dev team.
Codenvy circumvents these issues by leveraging and expanding the power of containers as the root of our product architecture. We tie containers to source code, runtime, and management tools. This enables anyone to leverage their benefits without having to be a Docker expert.
Whether on-premises or in the cloud, containers are fundamental to our vision of portable, universal workspaces that can execute without installing any software.
Learn more about Codenvy’s team capabilities here and get started with codenvy.io today.
