Microservices: Coming Soon to a Data Center Near You

Like it or not, the practice of IT management is going through some fundamental changes. Thanks to the rise of microservices, modern applications are made up hundreds of containers that collectively are more resilient than traditional VMs but perhaps more challenging to manage.

Instead of thinking of VMs as “cattle” that can be easily replaced, or “pets” that need to be cared for, the future of virtualization in the data center will more closely resemble an ant colony where the ants are application containers, Adam Johnson, VP of business for Midokura, a provider of network virtualization software, said. Should tens or hundreds of containers suddenly get wiped out, there will be another thousand standing by to take their place.

“Applications are going to consist of little services made up of multiple containers,” he said. “That will abstract away much of the process of scheduling and delivery inside the data center.”

Johnson is speaking at the Data Center World conference in National Harbor, Maryland, this September, where he will discuss how traditional approaches to managing VMs in the data center will soon fall by the wayside.

That abstraction layer, provided by tools such as the open source cluster management software Apache Mesos and Kubernetes, Google’s open source orchestration tools, will fundamentally change the way organizations think about IT operations, Johnson added.

In theory at least, it won’t be uncommon one day for a single administrator to be managing a hundred times as many server instances than they typically do today. The fundamental operations challenge IT operations teams now face is not so much how each of those containers will get managed, but rather how to prepare today for a new IT reality that at this juncture is all but inevitable.

For more information, sign up for Data Center World National Harbor, which will convene in National Harbor, Maryland, on September 20-23, 2015, and attend Adam's session titled “DevOps for Networking: Pets or Cattle?”