Using Containers to Improve the People Part of Your Business

Most discussions of containers focus on how they improve software delivery processes and complement other software tools. Equally important, however, are the benefits that containers offer to humans. Here’s a look.

The term people, process, technology refers to the three components that you need to get right to run a successful business. You sometimes hear these components discussed as the “golden triangle” of business success.

At first glance, containers may appear to be relevant only for part of this triangle.

After all, containers are essentially a tool. Their most obvious benefits are to help improve processes such as software staging, deployment, testing and security.

Containers Help People, Too

But if you think of containers as simply a way to improve tools and processes, you risk missing out on their ability to help make the people in your organization happier and more productive, too.

Containers help your people to do the following:

  • Use time more efficiently. Containers reduce the number of builds that have to be performed and the amount of manual configuration required to test and deploy an app.
  • Reduce mental stress. Less manual configuration and more automation mean fewer items for your people to have to keep track of in their ideas, and less worry overall.
  • Communicate better. Containers themselves aren’t a communication tool, of course. But by helping to provide more consistency and parity across the software delivery chain, they make communication between different groups easier.
  • Update faster. Developers don’t like spending time writing a new feature, then having to wait months before it reaches production. Likewise, IT Ops doesn’t want to wait on important updates to make their way slowly down the pipeline before they can be deployed. Because containers help to speed and automate the delivery chain, they keep both groups happier.
  • Do more with smaller teams. In an ideal world, you’d be able to hire more engineers whenever you have to scale operations up. In the real world, team growth rarely keeps pace with the size of deployments, and your people can easily become overwhelmed if they lack tools to help them scale. Containers are one such tool.
  • Focus on the things they enjoy. In general, manual building, staging, configuration and deployment of software is not a fun time. It’s tedious and can be stressful. By helping to automate the delivery chain, containers allow your people to avoid this tedium. They can instead focus on doing the things they really enjoy—such as writing good code in the case of developers, or finding ways to make infrastructure more efficient in the case of IT Ops.

In short, containers are a technology that can improve not just your processes, but also the overall happiness and productivity of your people. They’re the full package.

Christopher Tozzi

Christopher Tozzi has covered technology and business news for nearly a decade, specializing in open source, containers, big data, networking and security. He is currently Senior Editor and DevOps Analyst with Fixate.io and Sweetcode.io.

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