Short video on experiements with Rational and Docker

This is a short post, pretty much simply posting the video below.   I recently been experimenting with Docker and how it could be leveraged by Rational technology. The following video summarizes some of these experiments, most of which I have blogged about previously. 

Rational has a strong background in Agile development, and is well positioned to provide DevOps tooling. Docker, provides some really significant opportunities to bridge the gap between SaaS offerings and born on cloud style applications, and traditional on prem development.

As docker becomes more mainstream the focus of tooling is going to need to shift. Today deployment automation is a hot item and one that IBM Urbancode Deploy does very well. Moving forward though this provide will move into the background and tooling that manages the release and deploy processes for dockerized applications will be more and more important. We will need tooling that makes it simple to take a change to an application, package that change, test that change, tag the version according to quality and then release that change based on common release patterns (hotfix, canary, A/B, rolling upgrade).

These solutions will be needed both in the SaaS space and on-premise as well as needing to support hybrid scenarios. Docker will be key when enabling 'borderless cloud' scenarios both in terms of packaging applications in such a way that they can be run and scaled both on prem and in SaaS environments, but also in terms of providing powerful but simple DevOps tooling that can be leveraged in a SaaS environment, or deployed on prem. Leveraging docker containers to provide on-demand isolated environments is a nice way to scale out continuous integration processes, or to dynamically create environments for pre-integration testing or diagnostics.

While technologies to co-ordinate the deployment of an application as a set of distributed containers (fig, openstack, kubernetes, mesosphere...) are still evolving it is promising enough that we should consider this as a default packaging choice when distributing solutions moving forward.