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Jared Douglass
Guest
Paul Nashawaty, Senior PaaS Solutions Engineer, Progress Pacific
A while back, I wrote up a post aimed at telcos looking to expand their cloud offerings. My advice to them today is the same as it was then—you have to add value to your offering beyond infrastructure.
Century Link’s recent foray into the cloud with Panamax seems to support that. It simply isn’t enough to just provide server space to customers these days. You have to sweeten the deal with features and tools that aid application development and deployment. Luckily, with a powerful PaaS and technology like Docker, adding value is easier than ever.
The Docker Difference
Docker is a standard way to package and distribute applications so they will work on any platform. Think of it like USB—a universal way to connect devices to each other. Before USB, keyboards, mice and printers all had different connectors and moving files around meant using piles of floppy discs or CDs. If the back of your computer didn’t have a plug that matched the connector of your printer, it meant you had to buy a new printer.
Today, almost everything works using the same standard. You don’t need to stand in the computer store wondering if the mouse you are about to buy will work with your computer. You can simply take it off the shelf. You also don’t need to fret when you need to move files from one place to another. Just throw the files on a USB flash drive; you know it will work with the computer on the other side.
Docker does a similar thing for software. By placing applications in containers that work on a standard framework, you can be sure they work wherever they are run.
The Portable PaaS
Docker is a huge benefit to PaaS because it guarantees portability. That’s why we’re making a point to use it with Progress® Pacific™ and the Modulus™ platform, where portability is a key part of our value proposition. Pacific and Modulus apps will run the same wherever they are hosted—whether that’s on-premise, in a public cloud, or both as a part of a hybrid cloud deployment.
If you’re a telco trying to get into the cloud business, this is huge. You’ll want to show your customers that you provide value, but can’t scare them off by requiring an overnight shift to the cloud. By leveraging a platform like Modulus, you can let your customers ease into cloud migration with a hybrid deployment where they are still using their on-premise servers in addition to the public cloud services you are offering.
Your customers can be sure that when they inevitably move to a full cloud-based infrastructure, none of their applications will suddenly break. Thanks to Docker and the application management features of the PaaS, they’ll keep chugging along same as they always have.
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