Today’s container technology is revamping and transforming how businesses deploy and use applications in the data center and in the public cloud.
"By 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 30% today" - Gartner
Why container orchestration?
Container orchestration basically refers to the tools and platforms used to automate, manage, and schedule workloads that are defined by individual single containers.
It results in faster deployment, scaling, and networking of containers. It can be used in any environment where you leverage containers. Importantly, it can help you deploy the same application across varied environments without having to redesign it.
Additionally, you can share specific resources without risking internal or external security. Isolation of app improves web application security by segregating each application's processes into different containers.
"Worldwide container management revenue will grow strongly from a small base of $465.8 million in 2020, to reach $944 million in 2024" - Gartner.
How does it work?
Essentially, container orchestration tools automate and manage many tasks and pieces associated with microservices in a large application, including scheduling and organizing tasks– such as configuration, scaling containers to balance workloads, allocating container resources, load balancing or traffic routing, cluster management, service discovery, provisioning and deployment of containers, health monitoring for containers and hosts and in shifting containers due to an unavailable host or lack of resources.
Kubernetes container orchestration—a popular choice among enterprises
While Docker and Mesos are popular choices , Kubernetes remains the clear winner in the container orchestration space. Kubernetes has become the number one choice among large businesses that focus on having a DevOps approach and which is strongly supported by top cloud services like AWS.
Kubernetes is known for its portability. In here, the workloads can be moved without redefining the application or infrastructure since its starting point is the cluster, which increases its portability. Kubernetes is strong because it has an abstracting layer of hardware that allows DevOps teams to deliver PaaS, making it even easier to request additional resources to scale an application, eliminating the redundancy and requirement for more physical machines.
Now that the industry has settled mostly on a single orchestration tool, enterprise IT teams have realized the potential benefits of using containers. Developers can create applications faster as microservices drive efficacy and align to more resilient code practice. This can only mean one thing: businesses can create applications fast time and become more responsive to market demands.
How to implement containers
As containers are increasingly becoming popular, every businesses should explore the use of containers to find out how they can improve the efficiency, save money, speed up application development and thereby improve their delivery deadlines. Here are a few basic steps to get you started.
Firstly, familiarize your IT and development teams with deploying a Kubernetes stack in the public cloud. It does not matter how small, or self-contained the environment it is but something not connected to your corporate network. These early steps will help allow your team to learn the basics.
Analyze and assess your current IT environment. Identify workloads that are standalone and which do not require other apps to run. These applications become the best bet for containerizing.
Look for passionate team members within your development team who firmly believe in the concept of container strategy. Once you’ve figured out the team of individuals, encourage them and provide them all ammunition and resources to help harness their skill.
Gartner suggests and recommends that infrastructure and operations leaders who are focused on IT operations transformation to create a list of container management goals and outcomes as a foundation to measure results achieved with containerization. These goals and outcomes can are based on factors such as orchestration options, public/private/hybrid cloud choices, their compatibility with existing security policies, and internal skills requirements, among others.
Orchestration platforms have a number of capabilities that they need to support and this is why operations teams and the role of SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) is growing day after day because there are a lot of things that they need to be cautious when running an application in production.
Encourage participation in Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and other organizations that support Kubernetes so that your team gets abundant opportunities for learning, scaling up and support. Also, suggest to your IT operators and developers to stay updated on container-related offerings, as the industry is fast-evolving and constantly changing.
In brief, container orchestration efficiently automates the container lifecycle management in large app environments. You can develop and deploy apps to the cloud with velocity, agility, and efficiency. This holds true for large businesses with complex security and governance needs that require to be easily implemented and enforced with simple workflow standards. With its resource management and load balancing capabilities, container orchestration proves an extremely valuable and effective approach to running containers at scale and speed, resulting in improved productivity and scalability.
Today’s enterprises are moving in the direction of leveraging containers on bare metal, virtual machines, and in the cloud. Enterprises must, therefore, draw up a containerization strategy and align it to business goals.
Innominds expertise in container orchestration and microservices
Innominds is at the forefront of this transformation, helping our customers in developing and evolving to be more container and developer-friendly.
With Innominds expertise in leveraging container orchestration for microservices and especially with our Microservices Maturity Model framework, enterprises can assess their microservices maturity level with respect to container orchestration (Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker) and the adoption of microservices and take corrective actions before embarking on the journey to achieve agility, scalability and delivery of large scale apps at speed.
Once an enterprise is ready for microservices adoption, they can utilize Innominds’ digital assets library (DAL) and iSymphony™ platform (a low code, no code rapid application development platform) to get the acceleration they need for their microservices development and an accelerated digital transformation journey. Innominds expertise in microservices architecture and container orchestration empowers enterprises to build highly functional, faster, native and progressive web apps for increased user engagement.
