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Empower DevOps Pipelines with Container Ingress App Services

Jonathan George Thumbnail
Jonathan George
Published December 31, 2018

Many IT professionals are now fast-tracking their knowledge and support of container environments to keep up with app services demand. The growth of container app development incorporated into DevOps pipelines is nearing peak adoption across the app landscape. In the 2018 Annual Container Adoption Survey: “Over 80 percent of IT professionals and teams have deployed container technologies…This is up from 58 percent of teams that said they were running these technologies in 2017.”

However, some challenges have arisen in deploying containers. For instance, in talking with developers, management of containers introduces added complexity increasing app time to production. In addition, one of the harder challenges that the 2018 State of the DevOps Report by Puppet and Splunk highlights is the challenge of automated testing and reuse of testing patterns.

In my last blog, I highlighted that automation is key for IT pros to support DevOps CI/CD practices related to app dev/test and production deployments in container environments reducing app time to market. When planning and implementing container app services, selecting a solution that enables blue/green and a/b testing along with automation of app services allows for scale and decrease of deployment timelines.  

When selecting a container management tool, Kubernetes has the majority of the market with 83% according to the 2nd half Cloud Native Computing Foundation 2018 bi-annual survey followed by Amazon ECS at 24%. In addition to container orchestration, many app developers need data metrics and analytics either in management reporting or with export to third-party vendor analytics for in-depth visibility and issue resolution.

Though many teams have trouble tightly integrating App Dev and network processes with third-party ecosystems, F5 declarative automation and orchestration solutions combined with ecosystem integrations are capable of delivering app services anywhere, including as Ingress into container environments. F5 is an Ingress provider cited in the CNCF 2018 bi-annual survey, as many users combine container integrations to Kubernetes, OpenShift, and other environments with the advanced scale and security app services from F5.

Container Ingress App Services diagram

Moreover, F5 allows you to achieve visibility, and observability of all container traffic and delivers enhanced app insights through data-stream export to monitoring and analytics platforms. F5 automation and orchestration services – along with ecosystem integrations in Containers and PaaS combined with third-party configuration management, orchestration services, and cloud vendor services – are helping IT and app teams automate app services for modern application development, DevOps CI/CD pipelines, and production apps anywhere with scale, security, and confidence.

Learn more today at f5.com, read the technical information on clouddocs.f5.com, and download F5 Container Connector and start automating Ingress app services.