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Using virtualization to meet demanding graphics app needs
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Computer Weekly 17 July 2018: How container technology is evolving
In this week’s Computer Weekly, as adoption of containers grows rapidly, we look at the choices and potential benefits of the technology, the efforts being made to secure internet of things devices and how the latest Brexit plans will affect the UK tech sector.
Also featured:
- Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy presents supportive response to Lords select committee report on artificial intelligence.
- We talk with Mike Young, CIO at British Gas parent company Centrica, whose CEO recently discussed strategy with Microsoft head Satya Nadella.
In the final part of our buyer’s guide to automation and intelligent systems management, we look at how robotic automation is changing the infrastructure management game, helping IT departments make fewer mistakes and boost their productivity.
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Server Virtualisation in the Cloud: Spotlight on Australia/New Zealand
Despite Australia being one of the most mature virtualisation software markets in the world, there is still room for enterprises to take their virtualisation efforts to the next level. More and more of them are now turning to the cloud, running virtual machines on cloud infrastructure and platform services.
In this e-guide, read about what suppliers are doing in a market that is yearning for more efficient ways of running their business, and the role of hyper-converged infrastructure and hybrid IT in supporting the market’s demands.
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How server virtualisation is evolving to cloud native environments
Server virtualisation has given businesses the ability to abstract applications and the operating system from the underlying hardware. For years organisations have used virtualisation to gain greater levels of utilisation from their hardware investments, where one big server is divided into multiple VMs (virtual machines), each of which can be configured to run a workload, comprising an operating system and a software environment.
Businesses can deploy appliances, known as hyper-converged systems, that combine CPUs, storage and virtual server environment, all in one box. These tend to be horizontally scalable, enabling IT departments to grow their virtual server environment simply by adding another appliance. The management software in hyper-converged systems takes care of distributing workloads to maximise the greater level of computational power and storage available.
Today, thanks to the advent of infrastructure as a service, organisations can choose to run their VMs locally, on premise, or in a public cloud using IaaS (infrastructure as a service) from any of the major cloud providers.
Among the biggest problem areas in server virtualisation is the idea of VM sprawl. Since, they are not physical servers, VMs can easily be created. Often, however, they are not removed if they are no longer required. On-premise, this may not create such a big issue, since a dormant VM does not really consume resources like CPU, memory and storage. But if they are left to run indefinitely in the background, they will continue to consume valuable IT resources. In a cloud environment, businesses can incur huge fees if they fail to administer their virtual servers properly.
While server virtualisation is a well-established method to reduce IT costs by consolidating on-premise servers and running appropriate workloads in the public cloud, a new IT architecture is now emerging. Rather than virtualise existing software environments, new applications are increasingly being developed to run natively in the cloud. This approach departs from the horizontally integrated software stack that applications have traditionally been built upon. Instead, the application code is divided into functional units known as microservices, each of which runs in a lightweight virtual environment known as a container. The code within the container, can be an internally developed microservice, or one from an external provider. A cloud native architecture uses containers to run a set of microservices in order to perform a required function programmatically.
