“We don’t want to be locked into any cloud platform,” says Chaillan.
The main orchestration tool is open-source Kubernetes (Docker is another). “It’s what manages the containers — running them, restarting them, updating them, making sure they scale. The orchestrator does the management; not so much what you are running, but how you run it.”
MORE FROM FEDTECH: Bust these myths about containers, Kubernetes and app platforms.
Containers Give Software Developers More Flexibility
Containers give software developers new agility. “You can spin up a container faster than a virtual machine. Most VMs take five to 30 seconds to spin up based on size, while a container takes a few milliseconds. That is a big part of the attraction, because it makes you more flexible,” Chaillan says.
This should prove helpful when it comes to software development. “You can work on an individual piece in a way that is modular and flexible, so you can try new things just by swapping containers,” he says. “The container will behave the same regardless of whether it is a weapons system or a business system. We get the same behavior.”
That same neutrality gives DOD a big win when it comes to leveraging containers in support of legacy systems.
“We are moving pretty much every software system, everything from an F-16 jet to an F-35, into this containerized model,” Chaillan says. “Software continuously evolves, even on these legacy systems, and the container allows us to centrally update regardless of the database or the programming language that’s being used.
“If you use Java or C as a programming language, you can have a container for that, and you can update to the latest version without any downtime.”