There is no need to boil the ocean to start
As I have attended many Docker meetups, around the country, I always hear about the unicorns. Unicorns are companies like Netflix and how they have deployed microservice architectures and adopted containerization for competitive advantage. It would seem that every company now is a software company. Where speed of software innovation is a method to grow customers and revenue.
On the journey to Docker, many enterprises read about containers and envision it to be the key to becoming a unicorn, to increase their speed of software delivery and rate of innovation. They have visions of refactoring their applications into microservices, and seeing the promise fulfilled, with all the cloud type advantages of auto-scale and high availability.
Docker provides many benefits, including infrastructure consolidation and application isolation where multiple copies of an application server now can be run on the same host, and not be in contention. The benefits here, might be as simple as reducing the hardware footprint that you need for your QA grid, or increasing the speed to deploy tests in QA.
The point is that you do not have to boil the ocean and tackle refactoring into microservices as step one.
A great use case for Docker may be where you simply take one of your existing apps, package its legacy dependencies and run it in a container, on a more secure and current version of Linux, running on the host. This actually is not a new concept. I have personally witnessed this in the past. In the early days of virtualization when I was at Microsoft, I saw a common practice with our customers, of taking legacy Windows NT apps and running them in a Windows NT VM on a more modern version of Windows Server. The effort needed to re-write the app was daunting. However, running the legacy app in a more secure modern environment had many advantages for the enterprise, and was accomplished with significantly less effort.
So as you think about what step one is with Docker, consider alternatives to diving directly into microservices. Simply start with an existing app and take the first steps towards the new world of containers.
Also See These Related Blogs:
Getting Started Technical Blogs:
The post The journey to Docker for the enterprise appeared first on StackEngine.