Four Major Resistance Statements and How to Respond
By Bradley Clerkin, BreakFree Solutions CTO
The benefits of container platforms for organizations undertaking software development are substantial. To our surprise, we are seeing major resistance by some enterprise IT leaders to rapid adoption of container platforms. On a daily basis, I’m having to rationalize away the fear of change, which takes the form of one of four major resistance statements. Let me know if any of these statements sound familiar to you.
“This is just a trend, containers are the next IT science project, and they are not ready for production.” – Infrastructure Team
Would you call Amazon or Google a science project? They run some of the world’s biggest IT infrastructures, and container platforms have been at their foundation for over 10 years. Container platforms are not immature science projects. They are mature products, and that’s their key to long term viability.
“Containers are not secure.” – Security Architect
Compared to what? The majority of all security vulnerabilities are driven by inappropriate configuration. This holds true for any IT infrastructure solution. The problem is not a technical problem. It is a knowledge problem. Just like any IT infrastructure solution, containers can be secured by knowledge experts.
“I’m not going to rewrite all my applications to align with containers and microservices.” – Development Leaders
You never just replace infrastructure, you evolve it, and containers are the next evolution. Containers are not an “all-in” game, and you can move in small iterations. New development and justified rewrite work are optimal candidates to be replatformed onto containers.
“We can already handle microservices applications with our existing DevOps tooling and pipelines. Containers provide no additional functionality.” – DevOps Team
The integration of first generation DevOps tooling requires major engineering efforts to function correctly. The last thing an engineering team wants to hear is that the challenge they’ve just put a lot of energy and time into solving is now available out of the box. Well, that’s not a good reason to not use new capabilities that are going to let you increase your velocity and enhance software development performance. Containers are a game changer, and you’ve got to get used to the fact the game is going to change.
The tremendous impact of containers on DevOps, cloud, software development, and infrastructure is undeniable. BreakFree is working with our customers to help them understand and rationalize these fears. We have extensive experience designing, implementing, and operationalizing container platforms for the enterprise.