For those of you that attended the Wisdom Online APAC 2021, we hope you made the time to sit in on Camelia Balan’s session on licensing for containerised environments. If you couldn’t make it, here’s a summary of what Camelia had to say.
Containerisation provides multiple benefits when deploying applications. Security, portability, efficiency, and time to market are all examples of the advantages of containerisation.
When done well, those benefits are hard to resist. Who wouldn’t want those things? But, before you take the leap, you need to look at the full picture and understand the implications that containerisation has for software licensing.
All vendors have an approach to charging for containerised licensing, the bad news is that they aren’t all the same. Different vendors take different approaches and have different rules. So, before you simply install vendor software in a containerised environment (and expect no change to your licensing costs) you need to understand what you are getting into. Now, more than ever, you need to take a holistic view of how you deploy applications. Licensing and Architecture are not islands, they are joined at the hip. How you deploy is directly related to what you pay.
Offsetting savings, made in adopting containerisation, by increased licensing costs is an easy mistake to make. The glow of success in moving to containerisation wanes quickly when you have that aha moment and realise what you’ve done! In her presentation, Camelia discusses some high-level examples of how you can be caught out by the world’s biggest software vendors. While that’s a great start to helping you understand non-compliance, the devil really is in the detail. This is where the rubber hits the road in the services we offer. We know the detail and what the best scenario is for you when you balance manageability and cost.
The simple example that Camelia worked through is a case in point. All containers are not alike and even in a containerised environment there are ways of deploying applications to give you the manageability, security, and scalability you need. The issue is that it’s not as simple as it looks.
If you want certainty about the licensing implications of your move to a brave new world, we are here to help. Get in touch.