As enterprises execute their hybrid cloud strategies, they are looking to simplify critical functions, such as:

--moving applications across various infrastructures
--optimizing legacy applications
--introducing new functionality and services to legacy and cloud applications

Increasingly, they are choosing to build and deploy applications in containers, rather than virtual machines. Containers package all the code and dependencies needed to run a workload (including microservices, data, runtime environment, and system tools and settings) into a single, self-contained image. By abstracting the application from the underlying infrastructure, containers can be easily moved across infrastructures. Containers are also lightweight, consuming less of the server’s processing capacity than a virtual machine.

As container usage has grown, so has the complexity associated with orchestrating, provisioning, and managing container clusters. Scaling production workloads, ensuring consistent security profiles across clusters, and managing networking and storage can be difficult for users. And the most popular container management service, open-source Kubernetes, can actually make it more difficult to manage containers. In answer to user challenges, IBM and HPE recently launched new platforms to simplify container deployment and management.

In this report, we will examine the need for improved container management. We will also look at the two new container management platforms introduced by IBM and HPE.