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18 Containers For Dummies, HPE and Docker Special Edition These materials are © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. That's not to say that IT folks will simply forge ahead with con- tainers. There is a natural tendency to stick with what we know, a cultural paradigm driven by the desire for IT pros to keep systems operational 24/7/365. There is also a control issue. In many cur- rent architectural options, IT is the focal point. Let's take a quick trip back in time. There was a day when virtu- alization did not exist in its current form. During those dark days, intrepid IT visionaries charted a path through the virtualization wilderness, ultimately taming it so that organizations around the globe could enjoy the outcomes. After some time, virtualization became a truly disruptive force and, today, it's hard to imag- ine ever going back to what we had before. No longer do IT pros need to rack and stack dozens or hundreds of servers for a single application. Now, they just tap on the mouse a few times and — boom! — instant servers. Virtualization truly improved the lives of admins, but at the beginning, IT pros were wary. It seemed too good to be true. It took time for risk-averse IT pros to warm to the technology, but they did. And now, virtualization is standard in the data center. A similar story will be written about containers. For container adoption to become widespread and for organizations to modern- ize their application infrastructures, applications will need to be able to support the technology and skeptical IT pros will have to be won over. With containers, you can run your application on any infrastructure — virtualized or bare metal — which allows both development and operations to manage their portion of the application life cycle with the tools they require, without having to change the application code. The end result is a streamlined, more collaborative environment. Operations can quickly and easily provision development envi- ronments with containers, or they can allow development to self- manage their own environments, freeing time from the operations workload. Similarly, development can share knowledge about, for example, the applications they're producing, and the debugging tools and techniques available to them. This greatly reduces the time spent by operations when supporting production systems, because they're able to solve problems faster. There's even a word for this culture change; it's one that describes the merging of development and operations: DevOps.