Running Containerized Workloads in an on-prem Datacenter

Over the past decade virtualization moved from upstart, to mainstream, to become the dominant form of application deployment in a datacenter. Containerization is much newer but is growing as a means to deploy applications in a more portable fashion, with better support for horizontal scale out to handle elastic demands.

This talk will cover options and best practices for using containers and open source platforms to deploy applications and backing services, in a way that will run in an on premises datacenter, but still be portable, largely unchanged, to public clouds.

We will survey and compare popular orchestrators (Apache Mesos, Cloud Foundry, DC/OS, Kubernetes , Docker Swarm) and address what is possible, enhancements underway now, and limitations that still exist.

The menu of options for on-premises deployment is almost too rich by some measures (number of choice of distributions, deployment tools, etc). Just as few organizations find it viable to start using Linux by building the kernel from scratch, from GitHub source, a practical production worthy deployment plan will likely start with a distribution, but will also need to consider day 2+ operations like patching, version upgrades, and node count growth.

We will sort of the options for deploying container orchestrators on bare metal (without a mandated virtualization layer) hardware, and over on prem virtualization in a broad, vendor neutral comparison of features and attributes.