Automation behind the scenes allows systems to work and grow while the rest of IT goes about the daily business of innovation, rather than systems maintenance. For many containerized applications, the initial installation can be easy. But then these applications likely need to have permissions configured a certain way, be updated when software patches fix a security issue, or backed up for data protection or reconfigured when the state drifts away from the expressed intent. When specific operational knowledge is required for backups or patches to be handled correctly, there is more business logic required for the application to function as expected.

As you scale your applications, you further multiply the knowledge required to run these apps. This entails larger amounts of IT coordination, from network permissions, to systems allocation, to backup, logging, and service updating. To deliver an "App Store experience," you should have a way to package the business logic with the application in a way that can be repeated through automation. Red Hat OpenShift combined with Kubernetes Operators is designed to provide this out of the box.