Containers, orchestration, automation, full remote management, cloud-style distributed app development, continuous developer-continuous deployment and devops are the wave of future IT, and what sophisticated IT departments should be aiming for in the future. But there’s almost certainly at least one server your business relies on that is a unique and special snowflake — a pet you’ve named, rather than just another head of cattle in your data center that you can easily replace if it ever fails. Many companies that say they have private cloud have far less automated virtualisation environments, so it might be more than one.
Whether it’s an elderly application you’re not ready to replace, a control system for hardware where the vendor has never come out with a newer version, or any other server that you can’t – or aren’t ready to – move to the new world, you have to keep it running smoothly while you plan for how you eventually replace it. Here are some tools to make that more bearable, and more reliable.
