Opeyemi E. Alao, known for expertise in Cloud Native Engineering, has grown into an advocate for technical advancement. With Nigeria forging ahead into the era of technological excellence, he has made his niche in the echelons of the tech industry.
With the Cloud Native career driving technical innovation, he is still focused on leading strategies that set Nigerian companies up for global success. One of the more technical strategies that he is advocating for Nigeria is to adopt product containerisation.
He believes quite firmly that product containerisation is efficient and scalable, and gives a competitive advantage to small, medium, or large-scale companies in the global marketplace.
Product containerisation is a technical method of bundling a product application’s code files as well as all the dependencies and libraries needed for it to run on any infrastructure. This encapsulation framework produces a portable material called an Image; a summary of all the viable components that make the application work.
This Image can be deployed on any compatible computer operating system platform in an isolated environment called Container. Having everything an app needs to run in one piece, rather than lumping together all the moving parts (code, the settings, the tools it needs to run) to get it working, containerisation tidies everything up, making portability and consistency in the development of the application a very easy thing to do. This container has everything that is required for the app to function and therefore wherever it goes to be used, be it on a different computer or somewhere in the cloud, it will work perfectly.
According to him, the advantages of product containerisation embody economic realization and have a positive impact on the Time-To-Market (TTM) of the product. By combining apps and their dependencies into a container, companies may steer clear of problems that often occur when executing apps on several systems, as is the case for organizations that have a sizable number of engineers working on the same app. This eliminates the possibility of incompatibilities causing apps to fail when developers swiftly switch them between environments.
Other important advantages are fault isolation and security. He emphasised how containers keep vulnerabilities from propagating across systems by isolating programs from one another. In light of cybersecurity issues, which are becoming a bigger worry in many African countries, this is essential for guaranteeing.
“The practice of containerisation has been adopted by numerous organisations worldwide. It has been shown to revolutionise IT companies from the USA to India, yielding significant engineering operational benefits such as increased productivity and increased TTM. Like other nations, Nigerian companies can gain several benefits by adopting containerisation”, he pointed out.
While Nigeria’s tech ecosystem has been expanding, it has mostly stayed within a particular set of difficulties in the country’s current technological environment. These include embracing cloud-native technology and the necessary long-term infrastructure development, the Nigerian tech ecosystem needs faster knowledge dissipation to catch up with the rest of the world. As an industry expert, Opeyemi maintains that containerisation adoption would bridge this gap and allow Nigerian companies to use technologies that international organisations enjoy, he extended that the practices of containerising software applications would put local products at a vantage position to utilise cloud platforms and tools like Kubernetes to scale applications to local demands.
Furthermore, he remarked that top international companies utilise container orchestrator Kubernetes to manage more than one container concurrently emphasising how these technologies can provide quicker deployments and continuous updates, improving overall corporate agility. Nigerian businesses will be able to better control infrastructure expenses and lower downtime risks with the implementation of these technologies. Resources would be greatly optimised if containers could scale dynamically in response to demand.
Talking at ‘Building to Scale’ – A conference targeted towards technology leaders and enthusiasts, where he gave a talk on “Understanding Container Networking In Docker,” a pursuit he embarked on to spread the gospel of the importance of product containerisation; “Today, inside most of the large enterprises, Docker and Kubernetes has become the de facto engine for building and running containers at scale. At a very high level, Docker integrates a command line interface that speaks with a daemon process that handles the intricacies of container management such as; building, listing, inspecting, removing, publishing, and so on. Docker makes packaging simpler so that you can wrap such services in containers, which is particularly helpful in microservices when numerous services are being deployed to work in synchrony.” Opeyemi remarked.
To bridge the technical know-how gap and integrate containerisation into the Nigerian ecosystem effectively, Opeyemi’s vision for Nigeria’s adoption of product containerisation goes beyond just promoting a technological shift. It is about empowering local businesses, developers, and the tech ecosystem as a whole through education, improved infrastructure, strategic partnerships, and stakeholder support.
He came to the conclusion that containerisation is a need rather than an option. As Nigeria’s landscape changes, this will enable Nigerian businesses to improve their workflows and update their frameworks to be competitive in an increasingly technological world.
