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CHAPTER 2 The Benefits of Application Containerization 13 These materials are © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Closer integration between development and operations Historically, developers and IT have sometimes had a contentious relationship. Developers blamed IT for providing shoddy infra- structure, and IT blamed developers for writing shoddy code that brought systems to their knees. Container-based solutions can help to close this gap by enabling a build → ship → run methodol- ogy. This can be accomplished by allowing far more integration between applications and infrastructure. The end result is a far closer relationship between development and operations than has been seen in the past. In fact, there's even a name for this phenomenon: DevOps. DevOps is a mind-set in which developers and operators work closely together to ensure that software runs well on production systems. Modernized Applications for Improved Operations We're now living in a software-defined world in which we have application programming interfaces (APIs) for everything and anything in the data center. We're also living in an era in which computing power is plentiful and we can move previ- ously hardware-centric capabilities into a far more flexible and INFRASTRUCTURE AS CODE The promised land for many organizations — even if they don't know it yet — is what is referred to as programmable infrastructure or infra- structure as code. With the right underlying physical infrastructure, such as products from HPE, developers can easily manipulate infra- structure just as they do with any code that they write. Where Docker comes into play here is that containers provide the workload runtime for the environment. With programmable infrastructure, developers can programmatically deploy more resources into the data center and, from there, spin up more containers to address, for example, increased traffic.