Are You Ready For Cloud-Based Software Containers?

So let’s talk about software for just a moment. Software can be very difficult to create. In fact, if you want to create a software system that does anything, you’re going to have to tie together a bunch of different pieces of software. Each piece will do part of the task and then will have to communicate with other pieces of the software in order to get anything done. Just to make things even more complicated each piece of software may be made up of a bunch of different add-ins and libraries that all have to be there when the software runs. How complicated is this!

It turns out that it’s really, really complicated. Just in case all of that wasn’t complicated enough, now instead of running all of this complicated software on a computer that sits on your desk and you can touch, now everyone wants to run their software in “the cloud”. If we’re not careful, this is all going to get out of hand very quickly and nothing is going to work correctly.

I’ve got some good news for you – there is a solution to all of this madness. A little company called Docker came up with a really smart idea called “containers”. The basic idea is that if you shove all of your software into a container then you can move it around, run it anywhere, and it will always work.

Software containers are the wave of the future. Currently they are cutting edge stuff that people are only starting to understand. Your chance to get a look at containers, understand how they can be used, realize what their limitations are, and even get a peek at the really fancy ways that people are starting to deal with managing containers is going to happen at this IEEE Computer Society meeting.

Just in case you didn’t understand how big of deal containers are, IBM agreed to buy the company Red Hat for $34 billion because Red Hat is very good at dealing with containers. Now do I have your attention?

Sign up online at: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/187012

Join us on Wednesday evening, February 13th at 6:00pm. We’ll be meeting at TECO Hall which is located at TECO Plaza, 702 N. Franklin St., Tampa. If you have any questions, feel free to contact the meeting organizer, Jim Anderson at jim.anderson@ieee.org. I’ll see you there!