Digital transformation is an unstoppable force pushing nearly every organization to modify the way they operate. Seeing the competition gain an edge by embracing cloud-based resources and services is driving businesses to become more agile.
To keep up with the rapid pace of change, organizations need to deploy applications faster, and to reduce expenses incurred from running legacy application in a traditional manner. To do this – to digital transform without completely disrupting their business – organizations must move through a hybrid environment to begin leveraging the cloud.
To help customers with overall management of their identity management infrastructure and their transition to the cloud, One Identity Manager in its latest release is providing support for container-based images for some of its core components.
Before we can articulate what this important innovation means to a One Identity Manager customer, I will explain a few things about container images, containers and Docker.
- Docker is the containerization technology enabling these initiatives and microservices. But what is a container and what is the value to enterprise teams wanting to leverage Docker?
- Per Docker’s definition, a container image ‘contains’ everything needed to run. It is a lightweight, stand-alone, executable package of software. It includes code, runtime, systems tools, system libraries and settings. It is available for both Linux and Windows-based applications. The true awesomeness of containerized software, is that it will always run the same, regardless of the environment.
- The starting point of the process is the Dockerfile, which includes the details about the configuration of an application and necessary resources. This file tells the image builder (i.e. Jenkins) what the image should look like.
- From the dockerfile, a Docker image gets created. The image is a snapshot of the application. These artifacts are stored and managed in a Docker registry. Multiple versions of an image (application) called “tags” can be stored in repositories (folders) within a registry. This enables teams to easily update applications by tweaking the image, creating a new tag, then storing the new version within the registry.
- Finally, at run time, the engine reads the Docker image and spins up a Docker Container. This becomes the standard and isolated unit in which the application is packaged together with all of its libraries and binaries.
How does this help One Identity Manager customers? It’s helpful because it enables customers to quickly deploy specific components, reduce operational cost by running specialize containers versus a classic virtual machine or a physical server, and enables our customers to run some of Identity Manager’s components in a high availability/load balancing scenarios.
Starting with the Version 8 Service Pack 1 release, all One Identity Manager customers will be able to go to http://hub.docker.com to find and deploy the following One Identity Docker images:
- One Identity Manager - Job-Server image: Oneidentity/oneim-job
- One Identity Manager - Application Server image: Oneidentity/oneim-appserver
- One Identity Manager - Web Server image: Oneidentity/oneim-web
There are times when implementing an identity management strategy that you may have to onboard a very large target system with millions of records. Often this requires doing this late at night or over a weekend. With One Identity Manager containerized images, why not pull down a specialized Job Server image instead, run the Job Server container in a high availability scenario using Docker swarm or Kubernetes (without having to configure or setup the product any differently) to auto scale to the demands of the onboarding initiatives. That means fewer late nights or weekend monitoring of the onboarding process.
The same applies to downloading a specialized image of the Application or Web Portal so that it can quickly deploy the Application or Web Portal.
Videos
For more information about our support of Docker and containerization, watch our videos that explore various related topics and provide insights on installation and troubleshooting this amazing technology on a number of platforms.
