As noted the last time we discussed containers, specifically Kubernetes, they pose a significant challenge for IT. You can easily lose sight of applications in containers, including whether or not you’re license compliant.
Container-based licensing is evolving and there are both compliance and cost issues to consider when implementing them across your IT estate. They also currently represent a significant risk to organizations using them more and more. It’s notoriously difficult to discover or track the software included inside them, which can be licensed from commercial vendors.
Not only can they be difficult to manage, but containers are an evolving technology bridge between on-premises and the cloud; in order to facilitate better cloud migration decision making and management of IT resources which undergo that transition, organizations must be able to improve their view into their IT asset inventory. With this uncertainty, it’s understandable that many organizations have issues keeping track of and effectively managing container inventory.
My environment is unique and has distinct security requirements
For Kubernetes deployment in high-security environments, organizations often have governance policies in place that don’t allow for additional processes to be executed when an image is deployed to the cluster. That’s where Flexera comes in.
Flexera knows containers, and specifically Kubernetes. The Flexera Kubernetes inventory agent operates with the least required privileges, deployed to the container itself, to collect Kubernetes cluster inventory and annotations. What’s more, it even integrates with IBM License Service certified by IBM.
While other tools can discover containers—and the software within managed and orchestrated by Kubernetes—as well as display hierarchy within the IT estate, none can show what Flexera One shows: detailed analysis of the software running in those containers that is needed to truly enhance visibility and actionability.
IT Asset Management
It all starts with knowing what’s in your IT ecosystem. Flexera One discovers even the most elusive assets whether on-prem, SaaS, cloud, containers and more.
This process solves a problem many organizations have with a lack of transparency into their containerized environments. Using Flexera Kubernetes discovery removes the dependency many organizations have on libraries, using a lightweight agent to discover inventory with minimal need for privileged access, and therefore minimal additional work and disruption for your teams.
Containers are part of the larger, evolving ecosystem
As IT asset management, including software and hardware, expands and blurs the lines into SaaS and cloud visibility and management responsibilities, it’s important for organizations to continue to adapt to changing technologies. Just as technology has evolved to incorporate demand for virtual machines and SaaS in the past few decades, container visibility is another element businesses need to continue to involve in their technology strategy—whether with container orchestrators like Kubernetes, as well as the lesser-used Rancher, Docker swarm or Mesos, or with specific pre-integrated containerized software like IBM Cloud Paks built on Red Hat OpenShift.
To find out how Flexera can help you get a handle on your container inventory discovery and management, ask us for a demo.
