New Sysdig CEO Charts Containers Course

The new CEO for Sysdig contends that IT management is about to be transformed fundamentally by the advent of containers.

Suresh Vasudevan, who was announced this week as the new CEO of a company that specializes in the monitoring of container environments, believes most organizations don’t yet appreciate is the level of detail about the overall IT environment that can be garnered from containers.

In fact, Vasudevan says that level of detail is several orders of magnitude deeper than what most organizations can decipher from virtual machines. As a result, Sysdig is in a unique position to take advantage of an ability to apply out of the box instrumentation that not just addresses containers and platforms such as Kubernetes, but also secures them, he says, adding that, collectively, those capabilities allow Sysdig to provide visibility into the overall containerized application environment.

Vasudevan, formerly the CEO of Nimble Storage before its acquisition last year by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE),  says the shift to containers involves a lot more than simply taking advantage of a new way to package applications. The goal is to enable organizations to rethink how software should be built using microservices based on containers.

451 Research predicts the cloud-enabling technology market will reach $39.6 billion through 2020, with containers representing the fastest growing segment of that market, at 40 percent.

Vasudevan notes one of the biggest inhibitors to realizing that growth rate is a general lack of expertise. Couple that with the sheer number of containers in an IT environment that must be monitored and secured, and it’s only a matter of time before organizations rely more on services provided by Sysdig, he says, noting most organizations will find it difficult to keep track of what containers are being deployed, updated or replaced without some core monitoring capability—especially as containers are distributed across private and public clouds, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments and even bare-metal servers. Because of that, monitoring tools that are focused on a small number of deployment models will find it difficult to remain relevant in enterprise IT environments, Vasudevan says.

Vasudevan points out the majority of the organizations currently using containers in production environments tend to be high-end enterprise that have extensive internal IT expertise. But it’s only a matter of time before midmarket IT organizations begin shifting to containers as part of the general megatrend to deliver more application code at rates faster than ever.

Most organizations, however, have not fully appreciated the implications of that shift on the internal IT organization, he adds. As organizations continue to embrace DevOps principles, Vasudevan notes, significant changes to job functions inside traditional enterprise IT organizations is all but inevitable.

Containers and microservices in general may not have broad appeal among IT organizations that are faint of heart when it comes to embracing emerging technologies, especially if they appear to be complex to master and manage. But as container management technologies continue to mature in the months ahead, so, too, will the comfort level of even the most cautious of IT organizations.