Resiliency, efficiency, and agility have become necessary elements of higher education information technology (IT) services. IT teams are being asked to provide a greater variety of services with fewer resources. Software containerization, along with with tight coupling of development and operations teams can enable those teams to develop, deploy, and scale services much more rapidly than with traditional methodologies. Docker is the containerization technology that University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) has chosen to deploy the Banner software suite.

This presentation will feature UNBC IT team members from the development, infrastructure, and security groups discussing the basics of Docker software containerization and how Docker has been used at UNBC. We will also address how this shift in methodology has required the groups to adapt communications and project management techniques in order make the deployment successful.

Finally, changes in technology and methodology often bring new or altered security concerns. We will discuss some of the new security issues introduced with the use of Docker and how we have dealt with them.

Speakers

Warren Marusiak

Programmer Analyst II, University of Northern British Columbia

James Pohl

System Administrator, University of Northern British Columbia

Dave Kubert

IT Security Officer, University of Northern British Columbia