Containerization has emerged as a state-of-the-art technology, transforming how software applications are developed, deployed, and managed. This article explores the concept of containerization, its key differences from virtual machines (VMs), how OTRS is adapting to this technological landscape, and the numerous advantages it offers our customers.
Containerization: An Overview
Containerization encapsulates an application and its dependencies into a single, portable unit known as a container. These containers are isolated from the host system and other containers, ensuring consistency and reproducibility across different environments. Containers share the host OS kernel, making them lightweight and efficient, allowing for rapid deployment and scaling of applications.
Benefits of Containers:
- Portability: Containers run consistently across various environments, regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
- Isolation: Containers are isolated from each other and the host system, reducing conflicts and ensuring security and stability.
- Resource Efficiency: Containers use fewer resources compared to traditional VMs, resulting in faster startup times and reduced overhead.
- Environment Security: Containers only include components needed to run the application, reducing potential attack vectors.
- Network Security: Fine-grained policies for communication between components enhance security.
Differences Between Containers and Virtual Machines:
Architecture
Containers share the host OS kernel, making them smaller and more efficient.
Resource Utilization
Containers are highly resource-efficient and can be densely packed on a single host.
Deployment Speed
Containers can be spun up and down rapidly, ideal for dynamic, scalable workloads.
Architecture
VMs emulate an entire physical computer, including a full OS, leading to larger resource overhead and slower startup times.
Resource Utilization
VMs consume more resources during startup, making them less suitable for rapid scaling.
Deployment Speed
VMs are heavier in terms of resource usage, as they require a complete OS for each instance, leading to wasted resources and increased infrastructure costs.
OTRS’ Dedication to Containers
At OTRS, we are dedicated to following the containerization trend and are working intensively on enabling the operation of OTRS in a containerized environment. This results in several advantages for our customers:
Consistency: Containers provide a consistent runtime environment, reducing the “it works on my machine” problem and ensuring applications behave the same way across different environments. Because containers provide all required dependencies (like Perl version and CPAN dependencies, NPM modules, database and ElasticSearch requirements and many more) installation and update procedures are greatly simplified and result in reduced operating costs.
Portability: Containers encapsulate an application and its dependencies, making it easy to move applications between different environments, such as test or production systems, and even across different platforms or infrastructure types. For on-premise customers, this means applications can be seamlessly deployed across various data centers or hybrid environments without worrying about hardware or operating system compatibility.
Isolation: Containers are isolated from each other and the host system, enhancing security and stability by preventing conflicts between applications. For on-premise customers, this isolation provides significant security advantages by ensuring that each container operates independently with its own resources, filesystem, and network stack. This reduces the risk of one compromised application affecting others or the host system.
What We Are Currently Working On
We are constantly making necessary changes to OTRS to fully comply with the container philosophy. Key aspects include:
- Refraining from Storing Files Locally: We now support the use of the de facto standard protocol “S3” for ticket content and attachments. We are also moving the processing of processes and ACLs from the local file system to a distributed cache using Redis.
- Accessing Logs: We are working on enabling centralized access to logs from containerized applications, especially in a horizontally scaled operation.
- New SaaS Infrastructure: We are developing a new SaaS infrastructure using Kubernetes to orchestrate containers, ensuring security, isolation, and optimal resource utilization.
What You Can Expect in Upcoming Releases
In upcoming OTRS releases, changes and functionalities will be introduced to make containerized operation fully possible. Each change, such as the introduction of support for S3 as an article backend, can be used immediately and not only with the introduction of containers.
Strategic Outlook towards a Containerized Future
Containerization has revolutionized software development and deployment practices, offering a lightweight, portable, and efficient way to package and run applications. Containers align with modern software development practices, such as DevOps and microservices, and their compatibility with cloud-native architectures has driven their adoption.
Container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes have further accelerated the adoption of containers by providing robust automation and management capabilities. As the technology continues to evolve, containers are likely to play an even more central role in the future of software development and deployment.
Organizations that embrace containerization stand to gain a competitive edge by delivering software faster, more reliably, and with greater efficiency. This is why we are dedicated to introducing containers for the containerized operations of OTRS.
Benjamin Müller
Benjamin Müller is Chief Technical Officer of OTRS AG and responsible for OTRS Solution Management. With his team, he shapes the solution portfolio and researches innovative ideas.