Can Containers Ease Mergers & Acquisitions?
by shoowaAn Omnivore
Imagine a behemoth devouring prey. Can it swallow every bite without choking? Even the bones?
Imagine a corporation acquiring dozens of smaller firms across a decade. A few firms wrote applications in JAVA, many in Python, a few in Ruby, and many in Node.js. And an application is more than files of code: It is a collection of funding, people, and code. So new teams join the corporation.
The corporation won’t instruct them all to learn one language.
If the corporation wants to preserve the acquired services and continue exploiting the laborers profitably, then it needs to adapt to a polyglot environment.
Lean & Mean
Teams of Python web developers exist alongside teams of Ruby web developers and Node.js developers and JAVA developers. And the original corporation develops & operates a few C/C++ applications.
Would you expect the corporation to fund several Operations teams that each support a different digital service?
Neither did I. The corporation needs to grow net income instead of costs. It doesn’t want to choke. And management doesn’t believe that Operators distinguish a service in the market the way Developers do. A single team of operators that can maintain the same headcount despite the growth in developers, codebases, data, and revenue will rejuvenate the bottom-line.
This is possible with Kubernetes & Linux Containers.
Containers allow a team to bundle a programming language, code, & configuration, then deploy that bundle alongside different applications on the same host. And Kubernetes standardizes the deployment of those containers, and allows different digital services to receive various volumes of traffic on the same set of servers.
One team handling a single set of infrastructure.
The automated operations that Kubernetes provides can multiply the influence of a single Operations team. And allow a corporation to pursue a viable growth strategy.
The acquired developers will be free to continue developing old and new services in the language most comfortable to each of them.
Bottom Line
As long as the Department of Justice & the Federal Trade Commission continue to neglect their roles protecting the markets from monopolists, any firm can consider adopting Kubernetes & containers to devour the competition.
#corporate