The .Net Conference brings together developers, .net experts, enthusiasts, among others, to discuss, exhibit and enjoy all things .Net. While the main event took place in Sweden, throughout the month of September and October, Microsoft partnered with local organizers to bring the conference to venues around the world, showcasing local talent and elevating relevant topics, discussions, and workshops.
.Net Conference Colombia v2017 took place in Medellin, Colombia over Nov. 9th, 10th, and 11th. Sebastian Velez, Director of Engineering at Perficient Latin America, an agile, software outsourcing company is presented on the use of Containers, and the basic concepts behind Hybrid-Cloud and Multi-Cloud offerings. Highlighted below are some of the key takeaways from Sebastian’s talk.
The Beauty of Containers
Overall, containers have been very helpful for software development in the past couple of years, and Velez wanted to highlight the benefits that can be achieved from using containers. Containers have become more popular and the opportunities to utilize them are endless, and they are usually run in the cloud. A container, as defined by Docker, is “a lightweight, stand-alone, executable package of a piece of software that includes everything needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, settings.” Containers are especially useful because they:
- isolate applications in a shared operating system, and
- allow developers and professionals to deploy between environments without or only slightly modifying artifacts.
Additionally, the use of containers is especially relevant for those implementing microservices architectures. When used for microservices, containers:
- Can be easily deployed.
- Can be programmed in different languages, but have the same type of artifact.
- Each microservice can be scaled in a simple way.
- There are many tools to manage them.
Cloud Computing
It wouldn’t do to discuss containers without also covering cloud computing. And, in recent years cloud computing has evolved dramatically and anyone working with Continuous Delivery, Infrastructure as Code, Microservices and DevOps is most likely in the market for a flexible, portable, scalable and resilient cloud model.
Sebastian highlighted the differences between a hybrid-cloud – a management strategy of computing platforms that mix several types of cloud, and multi-cloud – using services from several public clouds and private clouds at the same time, and gives use cases for each scenario.
Hybrid-Cloud
More specifically, a hybrid-cloud is a management strategy of computing platforms that mix several types of cloud. A hybrid-cloud allows data and applications to be located in your own datacenter, or in a public cloud, or both. For example, you can scale in the public cloud when your data center does not have more capacity, or keep some information in your infrastructure that for some reason cannot be in the cloud.
Some use cases of hybrid clouds:
Offline needs
Government regulations or company policies
Progressive adoption of a public cloud
Multi-Cloud
Here Sebastian refers to a Multi-Cloud as using services from several public clouds and private clouds at the same time. Some reasons to adopt multi-cloud:
- Costs of some services in some providers
- Supplier optimizations
- Flexibility
- Avoid (to a large extent) dependencies
- Extra support for high availability and replication
We may have barely scratched the surface with containers and cloud computing, but these topics have been incredibly important for software development and aren’t going away anytime soon. To take a deeper dive into microservices. cloud computing, containers, and even outsourcing software development processes contact Perficient Latin America today to start a conversation.
About Perficient Latin America
PSL has led Latin America’s foray into software engineering best-practices. Today, we specialize in partnering with US companies large and small to solve their software engineering needs.
