WP_ModernAppArchitecture_07.18.2016

Modern App Architecture
for the Enterprise
Delivering agility, portability and control with Docker
Containers as a Service (CaaS)

MODERN APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE FOR THE ENTERPRISE
Executive Summary
Developers don’t adopt locked down platforms. In a tale akin to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, app teams
have been searching for the right mix of freedom and control for their app environments. Along the way, they
discovered that Platform as a Service (PaaS) models were too high-level, abstracted and restrictive -
sacrificing flexibility for a completely locked down, black box style environment. Similarly, Infrastructure as a
Service (IaaS) offerings with their respective container services are not sufficient as it provides a myopic view
of what resides solely in that infrastructure silo. In looking for that right-sized solution, organizations are
offering a Docker Containers as a Service (CaaS) environment to provide agility for development teams,
control for operations teams and portability of apps across any infrastructure - from on-premises datacenters
to public cloud, across a vast array of network and storage providers.
The Docker platform provides an integrated suite of capabilities for an infrastructure agnostic CaaS
model). With this solution, IT operations teams are able to secure, provision and manage both infrastructure
resources and base app content while developers are able to build and deploy their apps in a self- service
manner.
In this whitepaper, we will discuss the drivers toward new software models, the capabilities of the Docker
platform, detail the requirements of a CaaS and specify how they are critical to solving core challenges in
building, shipping and running apps anywhere.
Key Takeaways Include:
• How the cloud, data and microservices are changing the software that runs business
• Understanding the Docker journey 
• Docker Containers as a Service (CaaS) capabilities and benefits

Transforming business
through software
Gone are the days of private datacenters running
off-the-shelf software and giant monolithic code
bases that you updated once a year. Everything
has changed. Whether it is moving to the cloud,
migrating between clouds, modernizing legacy or
building new apps and data structure, the desired
results are always the same – speed. The faster
you can move defines your success as a company.
Software is the critical IP that defines your
company even if the actual product you are selling
may be a t-shirt, a car, or compounding interest.
Software is how you engage your customers, reach
new users, understand their data, promote your
product or service and process their order.
To do this well, today’s software is going bespoke.
Small pieces of software that are designed for a
very specific job are called microservices. The
design goal of microservices is to have each
service built with all of the necessary components
to “run” a specific job a with just the right type of
underlying infrastructure resources. Then, these
services are loosely coupled together so they can
be changed at anytime, without having to worry
about the service that comes before or after it.
This methodology, while great for continuous
improvement, poses many challenges in reaching
the end state. First it creates a new, ever-
expanding matrix of services, dependencies and
infrastructure making it difficult to
manage. Additionally, it does not account for the
vast amounts of existing legacy apps in the
landscape, the heterogeneity up and down the app
stack and the processes required to ensure this
works in practice.
The Docker Journey and the Power of AND
In 2013, Docker entered the landscape with app
containers to build, ship and run apps anywhere.
Docker was able to take software and its
dependencies package them up into a lightweight
container. Similar to how shipping containers are
today, software containers are simply a standard
unit of software that looks the same on the the
outside regardless of what code and dependencies
are included on the inside. This enabled
developers and IT ops teams to transport them
across infrastructures and various environments
without requiring any modifications and regardless
of the varying configurations in the different
environments. The Docker journey begins here.

Agility:
The speed and simplicity of Docker was an instant
hit with developers and is what led to the meteoric
rise in the open source project. Developers are
now able to very simply package up any software
and its dependencies into a container. Developers
are able use any language, version and tooling
because they are all packaged in a container,
which “standardizes” all that heterogeneity without
sacrifice.
Portability:
Just by the nature of the Docker technology, these
very same developers have realized their app
containers are now portable - in ways not
previously possible. They can ship their apps from
development, to test and production and the code
will work as designed every time. Any differences
in the environment did not affect what was inside
the container. Nor did they need to change their
app to work in production. This was also a boon
for IT operations teams as they can now move
apps across datacenters for clouds to avoid vendor
lock in.
Control:
As these apps move along the lifecycle to
production, new questions around security,
manageability and scale need to be
answered. Docker “standardizes” your
environment while maintaining the heterogeneity
your business requires. Docker provides the ability
to set the appropriate level of control and flexibility
to maintain your service levels, performance and
regulatory compliance. IT operations teams can
provision, secure, monitor and scale the
infrastructure and apps to maintain peak service
levels. No two apps or businesses are alike and the
Docker allows you to decide how to control your
app environment.
At the core of the Docker journey is the power of
AND. Docker is the only solution to provide agility,
portability and control for developers and IT
operations team across all stages of the app
lifecycle. From these core tenets, Containers as a
Service (CaaS) emerges as the construct by which
these new apps are built better and faster.

Docker Containers as a Service (CaaS)
What is Containers as a Service (CaaS)? It is an IT
managed and secured app environment of
infrastructure and content where developers can in
a self service manner, build and deploy apps.
In the CaaS diagram above, development and IT
operations team collaborate through the registry.
This is a service in which a library of secure and
signed images can be maintained. From the
registry, developers on the left are able to pull and
build software at their pace and then push the
content back to the registry once it passes
integration testing to save the latest
version. Depending on the internal processes, the
deployment step is either automated with tools or
can be manually deployed.
The IT operations team on the right in above
diagram manage the different vendor contracts for
the production infrastructure such as compute,
networking and storage. These teams are
responsible provision the compute resources
needed for the app and use the Docker Universal
Control Plane to monitor the clusters and apps over
time. Then, they can move the apps from one cloud
to another or scale up or down a service to
maintain peak performance.
Key Characteristics and Considerations
The Docker CaaS provides a framework for
organizations to unify the variety of systems,
languages and tools in their environment and apply
the level of control, security or freedom required for
their business. As a Docker native solution with full
support of the Docker API, Docker CaaS can
seamlessly take the app from local development to
production without changing the code and
streamlining the deployment cycle.
The following characteristics form the minimum
requirements for any organization’s app
environment. In this paradigm, development and
IT operations teams are empowered to use the
best tools for their respective jobs without worrying
of breaking systems, each other’s workflows or
lock-in.
1. Dev and Ops. Many tools specifically
address the functional needs of only one
team; however, CaaS breaks the cycle for
continuous improvement. To truly gain
acceleration in the development to
production timeline, you need to address
both users along a continuum. Docker
provides unique capabilities for each team
as well as a consistent API across the entire
platform for a seamless transition from one
team to the next.
2. Any app architecture. Organizations have
a variety of apps in their portfolio from
monoliths to microservices. A modern app
platform needs to be able to address all the
different apps within the infrastructure in a
common framework.
3. Any app stage. From continuous
integration to delivery and DevOps, these
practices are about eliminating the waterfall
development methodology and the lagging
innovation cycles with it. By providing tools
for both the developer and IT operations,
Docker is able to seamlessly support an
app from build, test, stage to production.
4. Any language. Developer agility means
the freedom to build with whatever
language, version and tooling required for
the features they are building at that time.
Also, the ability to run multiple versions of a
language at the same time provides a
greater level of flexibility. Docker allows
your team to focus on building the app

instead of thinking of how to build an app
that works in Docker.
5. Any operating system. The vast majority
of organizations have more than one
operating system. Some tools just work
better in Linux while others in
Windows. App platforms need to account
and support this diversity, otherwise they
are solving only part of the problem.
Originally created for the Linux community,
Docker and Microsoft are bringing forward
Windows Server support to address the
millions of enterprise apps in existence
today and future apps.
6. Any infrastructure. When it comes to
infrastructure, organizations want choice,
backup and leverage. Whether that means
you have multiple private data centers, a
hybrid cloud or multiple cloud providers, the
critical component is the ability to move
workloads from one environment to
another, without causing app issues. The
Docker technology architecture abstracts
the infrastructure away from the app
allowing the app containers to be run
anywhere and portable across? any other
infrastructure.
7. Open APIs, pluggable architecture and
ecosystem. A platform isn’t a platform as
an island to itself. Implementing new
technologies is not possible if you need to
re-tool your existing environment first. A
fundamental principle of Docker is a
platform that is open. Being open means
APIs and plugins to easily integrate into
your existing environment and processes.
This openness invites a rich ecosystem to
flourish and provide you with more flexibility
and choice in adding specialized
capabilities.
Although many, these characteristics are critical as
the new bespoke application paradigms only invite
in greater heterogeneity into your technical
architecture. The Docker CaaS platform is
fundamentally designed to support that diversity,
while providing the appropriate controls to manage
at any scale.
Docker CaaS Platform Technology
The Docker CaaS platform provides an integration
solution of container runtime, orchestration,
registry services, security and management. This
platform is open and extensible to existing systems
in your environment and can run on any
infrastructure.
Docker Datacenter
For organizations who need to keep their IP
within their network, Docker Trusted
Registry and Docker Universal Control
Plane can be deployed on-premises or in a
VPC and connected to your existing
infrastructure and systems like storage,
Active Directory/LDAP, monitoring and
logging solutions. Trusted Registry
provides the ability to store and manage
images on your storage infrastructure while
also managing role based access control to
the images. Universal Control Plane
provides visibility across your Docker
environment including Swarm clusters,
Trusted Registry repositories, containers
and multi container applications.

Your Docker CaaS can be designed to provide a
centralized point of control and management or
allow for decentralized management to empower
individual application teams. The flexibility allows
you to create a model that is right for your
business, just like how you choose your
infrastructure and implement processes. CaaS is
an extension of that to build, ship and run
applications.
Many IT initiatives are enabled and in fact,
accelerated by CaaS due to its unifying nature
across the environment. Each organization has
their take on the terms for the initiatives but they
range from things like containerization, which may
involve the “lift and shift” of existing apps, or the
adoption of microservices to continuous
integration, delivery and DevOps and various
flavors of the cloud including adoption, migration,
hybrid and multiple. In each scenario, Docker
CaaS brings the agility, portability and control to
enable the adoption of those use cases across the
organization.
The Power of AND
In conclusion, the shifts in cloud, applications and
data have changed the technology and business
conversation from “how are you reducing my costs”
to “how are you accelerating my business.” As you
embark on your journey, Docker provides the
added flexibility to choose where you store your
application content and host your control plane.
Whatever your business, Docker Containers as a
Service (CaaS) platform delivers agility, portability
and control with the ability to build the best
applications as fast and often as possible and
providing peak performance of these services at
optimal costs with no lock in.

WP_ModernAppArchitecture_07.18.2016

More Related Content

What's hot (19)

Viewers also liked (10)

Similar to WP_ModernAppArchitecture_07.18.2016 (20)

WP_ModernAppArchitecture_07.18.2016