Why Containers Are Becoming More Relevant for SMBs
Containers let organizations develop, deploy and scale applications more quickly and consistently without requiring large amounts of infrastructure, says Dan Ciruli, vice president and general manager of cloud native at Nutanix. Bundling an application and its dependencies makes it easier to move between environments without any major changes.
“For SMBs, this translates into several practical benefits, including faster application development, portability, scalability, access to newer technologies and more consistent IT operations,” Ciruli says.
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He highlights two ways containers can help SMBs address business challenges: First, the move to containerized software has expanded from “just bespoke projects to also packaged software,” he says, because a growing number of independent software vendors are now building their offerings to run in Kubernetes, which can reduce installation complexities. This approach also lets applications avoid conflicts over shared system libraries, runtimes or OS versions, and vendors can ship the entire required environment presealed, he notes.
“Updating vendor software is as simple as swapping a container image tag. If an update fails, rolling back takes seconds,” Ciruli says. “Multiple isolated vendor apps can safely coexist on the same host, removing the need to spin up dedicated VMs for each product.”
Second, he says, is the adoption of agentic AI. “Agents are effectively a new workload, and many companies, small and large, are starting to ponder how and where they will run agents effectively and securely. Kubernetes can provide the proper place — and means — for those agents to run,” he says.
However, before SMBs jump into a new environment, they should consider that most of the software they’re already running in VMs will stay there for the lifetime of the application. “Most software won’t get rewritten to run in containers. The implication then is strong: Companies are going to have to think of containers as a complement to virtualization,” he says.
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From a security perspective, SMBs should recognize that what they’d learned through managing virtualized workloads may not map one-to-one when moving to containers. “They may need to learn new concepts — for example, CNIs for overlay networks — but in nearly all cases, these concepts will map to something they already understand,” Ciruli says.
SMBs that want to experiment with containerization should find a platform that will allow them to use VMs and containers together, with as much automation as possible. Ciruli adds that the platform can run either in the cloud or on-premises as a bonus, which will help SMBs test what works best for them.
