British Gas and Paddy Power clash on containers at Computing Summit

The case for containerisation doesn't convince everyone

Chris Patten, IT architect at British Gas, and Stephen Lowe, director of technology at Paddy Power Betfair clashed in a panel debate at Computing's recent Cloud & Infrastructure Summit 2016 on the subject of containers.

Patten, who is involved in a cloud shift at British Gas, says that containerisation forms a key part of the company's shift towards a cloud-first strategy. "The big benefits of containers is that you can build one platform that can be shared by different groups within the organisation. So we are only having to build something once," said Patten.

British Gas, he added, is currently at the evaluation stage, considering different vendors' container technology before standardising on one. The shift is part of a major investment in IT by British Gas's parent company, Centrica.

But Lowe (pictured above), director of technology at Paddy Power Betfair, suggested containerisation was little different from simply spinning up a virtual machine. And, for a company like Paddy Power, whose core systems have been developed in-house, containers offered few additional benefits.

"I don't actually see the value of containers," he said. "We can spin-up a virtual machine really quickly. We own all of our own software. We spent years building our software to scale and use multiple cores.

"So I can understand if you have something that you want to put lots of instances out very quickly. But when you spin-up a virtual machine, it's immutable, it's all of the things that a container is. But using a virtual machine is slightly more heavyweight, and the overhead of changing to containers, for us, is not really worth it," said Lowe.

Patten suggested that whether an organisation chose to adopt containerisation would probably depend on its overall business and technology strategies. Indeed, he added, the all-cloud Connected Homes unit in British Gas, which is arguably the most advanced technically, has eschewed containers.

"Once we've caught up with our 'cousins' in Connected Homes, then perhaps the value proposition for containers starts to disappear," said Patten.

John Keegan, head of cloud infrastructure services at the DWP, came down on the side of containers. "They're very useful, but it's a case of the right infrastructure and the right way of doing things for the right applications," said Keegan. "Certainly, some of the new stuff that we are doing in digital is very much DevOps-driven and container-based."

Indeed, Betfair, which recently merged with Paddy Power, was an early adopter of DevOps methodologies.

However, while containerisation was an approach that had worked for many applications, that wasn't the case across the board for all of the applications that the DWP is currently re-writing and re-platforming.

"When you are doing things from scratch, building from the ground up, it can work really well. But when you try to transition existing applications it's a bit more difficult. If you've got a breadth of different skills across the team you can do different things," he said.