If your organization is still dealing with the provisioning headaches of traditional VM architecture, it’s probably time to make the switch to containers.
Although containers present many advantages over traditional VM architecture, they also come with a number of inherent risks – some of which are elevated beyond those of a conventional VM environment.
Containers are taking over the cloud services space for a number of very good reasons. They can make applications easier and faster to deploy, while streamlining a shift from broad, brittle services to agile microservices that adapt to users' needs.
Containers have completely changed the web development game. Ever since the release of Docker in March 2013, the concept of running services inside containers has exploded in popularity. Every time we talk with a developer in any tech sector, the topic of containers is just about guaranteed to come up.
But while containers do offer some distinct advantages over traditional VMs – for example, the ability to isolate CPU and network...
Containers are just a different way to run applications — but in the end, they need to serve your business’s goals.
On the first day at my previous job, my manager asked whether we were getting a good return on investment (ROI) from our cloud infrastructure. After just two days on the job, I could clearly see that we weren’t. Our VM’s CPUs were running at five percent on average, and memory was running below 40 percent.
Does the following conversation sound familiar?
CEO: Our AWS bill has gone to the roof. Why?
VP of engineering: We’re adding new customers! We need enough capacity to keep up with the demand.
CTO: But our average CPU and memory utilization are quite low. Why do we need more capacity if we’re not using all the infrastructure we already have?
VP of engineering: We get traffic spikes throughout the day. We need to be ready for them.
You already use functions to streamline your infrastructure. Why not do the same for containers?
These days, many developers find it easier and quicker to write limited scope services. Cloud Functions like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Functions provide a new serverless paradigm that hides infrastructure. In short: no servers, no pain!
Containers have already become the new standard for modular and efficient microservice...
Developers are forced to spend 3 months each year on dumb and repetitive tasks.
DevOps came up as we started to manage infrastructure as code. In the early days of DevOps, it was easy and fast to modify infrastructure components. Its purpose was to unblock developers by giving them such control. However, it became more and more complex, far beyond the original DevOps definition. In relatively small companies, developers still manage...
Even though the public cloud sparked a lot of innovation in scalable infrastructure, it failed to transform or reinvent how infrastructure and applications are built. We still need to deal with the same old constructs including virtual machines, complex networking topologies, and connecting different layers together.
We are now at a very interesting time in the history of computing where infrastructure and applications are being...
Many organizations as well as developers are moving to the public cloud to take advantage of being able to quickly scale their infrastructure. The cloud made scaling up and down infrastructure easier, more agile and less expensive. However, as adopters that build more complex applications quickly realize, this model is broken in many ways. We believe there are better ways to build and maintain your infrastructure on the cloud.
