2020 is over. And while it was an unprecedented year, the As a Service companies like Five9 helped make the widespread adoption of remote work a reality. For more As a Service information, check out my other blog series.

It takes a catastrophic event to stress test a system. Last year was just that event, as we saw massive amounts of internet traffic, cloud services up and down and sometimes degraded. Through it all, Five9 continued to function and moved forward with mergers and acquisitions.

As organizations adopt microservices and cloud-native design to support software development, they’re starting to hear a more frequent request bubbling up from their developers: a desire to work in containers, rather than virtual machines (VMs).

For now, the container space continues to be in flux, particularly as virtualization and cloud vendors work to meet the expanding demand. But a growing number of organizations are incorporating the use of containers into their environments, even those that haven’t traditionally been consumers of this type of technology.

Containers may not be the right move right now for your organization, but it’s worth keeping an eye on them, because that could change in the near future. First, let’s look at the major differences between VMs and containers.

When I was an IT infrastructure director in a previous life, I thought that the term “middleware” was something of a dirty word. I viewed it as inelegant — something that gummed up the works of applications rather than streamlining them (not to mention giving me just one more thing I needed to manage). I’m…

Application development teams have embraced software delivery models that allow for the quick rollout of new code on a continuous basis. In a society that expects applications to be updated regularly and offer responsive feature-rich experiences, developers and IT operations must embrace methodologies and platforms that can empower them to constantly innovate. The days of…