Are we there yet?

So, you might be wondering, are we there yet? Not really! Virtual Machines are to stay for a very long time. They have a good reason to exist, and while containers solve most problems, not everything can be containerized. There are a lot of legacy systems running on Virtual Machines that cannot be migrated to containers.

With the advent of the cloud, virtualized infrastructure forms its base, and Virtual Machines are at its core. Most containers run on virtual machines within the cloud, and though you might be running containers in a cluster of nodes, these nodes would still be virtual machines.

However, the best thing about the container era is that it sees virtual machines as part of a standard setup. You install a container runtime on your Virtual Machines and then, you do not need to distinguish between them. You can run your applications within containers on any Virtual Machine you wish. With a container orchestrator such as Kubernetes, you also benefit from the orchestrator deciding where to run the containers while considering various factors – resource availability is one of the critical ones.

In this book, we will look at various aspects of modern DevOps practices, including managing cloud-based infrastructure, virtual machines, and containers. While we will mainly cover containers, we will also look at config management with equal importance using Ansible and how to spin up infrastructure with Terraform.

We will also look into modern CI/CD practices and learn how to deliver your application into production efficiently and error-free. For this, we will cover tools such as Jenkins and Spinnaker. This book will give you everything you need to perform a modern DevOps engineer role during the cloud and container era.