iXsystems attended the Container World 2017 Conference in late February in Santa Clara, CA. Container World started off with training on the basics of containers and their uses, packing the room to capacity. The afternoon ‘Intermediate Containers Workshop’ allowed participants to gain a better understanding of container storage volumes and networking with deep dives into specific container technologies.
Over the next two days, attendees would have the option of listening to nearly 100 industry speakers. Nathan McCauley of Docker discussed the best practices developers should use to prevent rogue containers from compromising security. Abby Fuller of Amazon discussed the evolution of Amazon Cloud and how it has implemented various container orchestration services. Brandon Burns of Microsoft discussed the future of Containers as a Service (CaaS). Other talks covered topics such as security, container management, performance optimization, the cloud, virtualization and many other important subjects for professionals in the industry.
Between sessions on Wednesday and Thursday, attendees could walk the Expo floor for product demonstrations from exhibitors. There were many monitoring and orchestration tool companies, with some showcasing their products’ graphically rich and visually striking dashboards and displays. Most exhibitors were interested in demonstrating how they could manage and monitor your containers better.
“It came across as no surprise but the dearth of hardware products on the show floor was clearly evident,” said Director of Product Management at ixSystems, Steve Wong. “To many, this reflects how quickly the world of IT is evolving to exist out of sight in the Cloud and centralized storage.”
Throughout the conference, Docker and Kubernetes were the main topics of conversation among attendees and exhibitors alike. With those technologies being rooted in Open Source, many speakers and exhibitors had a positive regard for that development model.
“There was a strong Open Source flavor at Container World. There is a revolution taking place within enterprise IT that recognizes the benefits of the Open Source model,” said Steve Wong. “One of the speakers noted that ‘Open Source is a positive-sum game’, meaning that the more people play the game, the better the game becomes. At iXsystems, that is something we’ve believed for a very long time.”
Containers are a transformative technology and Container World had sessions that covered the business impact of the container revolution currently taking place within enterprise IT. At iXsystems, containers are a big part of the future for our storage platforms and this conference has been an exceptional resource for gauging the direction that the industry is headed.
