Showing posts with label Containers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Containers. Show all posts
Are Containers the future?
What are containers?
Containers can be compared to virtual machines but are very different. Containers contain groups of applications that can run directly on an underlying host operating system unlike virtual machines that require a hypervisor layer. This is greatly beneficial as you are able to achieve higher density, better elasticity, increased portability and advanced scalability. These advantages are achieved with less overhead management and administration.
The older way of achieving this same function was to have virtual machines running over a hypervisor which was running within a host operating system. Each of these layers require management and support and even the virtual machine had to run its own operating system. All of these operating systems require patching and other administration to operate. As you can see containers just contain the actual application and no other overheads are required.
How do containers work?
Containers are implemented using specific technology like Docker which was originally run within the Linux operating system. Nowadays containers can also be run on Windows. Docker containers are really the standard way of doing things now. If you require multiple containers, clusters or are looking to run containers in the cloud you need to look at Kubernetes which is the most popular container orchestration platform currently.
Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Can I use containers?
This question really depends on your specific workload and application. Most applications should be able to be ported into containers and then launched either onsite or in the cloud. One great thing about containers is that they can be run both onsite and in the cloud and are extremely portable between different operating systems and cloud platforms. With this flexibility its much easier to be able to move your containers anywhere you would like to run them. I would suggest further consultation with your developers and cloud architects to determine your use case and the best applicable solution for your use case.
Containers in the cloud
The easiest way to test and use containers in production is to launch them through your cloud platform. Each public cloud provider offers a widespread range of managed container solutions. Google Cloud Platform offers the original GKE Google Kubernetes Engine. This is currently the most advanced offering of managed Kubernetes in the cloud with Azure coming in second with the recently generally available AKS. Azure Kubernetes Service. Please read the below links in order to learn more about these platforms and containers.
Are containers the future?
Yes containers are the future of application technology in the cloud as well as on-premise. Containers are becoming more and more popular and learning and understanding some background in them whether you are a developer or operations engineer is really required. There are so many courses and further information out there and I suggest starting by looking at your cloud providers documentation to set you in the right direction.
Some great further information can be read here:
https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kubernetes-service/
https://www.docker.com/
https://kubernetes.io/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kubernetes-service/
https://www.docker.com/
https://kubernetes.io/
Cloud Based Compute Solutions
One of the most popular reasons for businesses moving to the cloud is for the use of compute power. This can be for migrating existing on premise workloads or transitioning to a cloud based virtualisation platform. Another reason with be the use of high performance computing. We will discuss some of the various compute options in this blog post.
Compute
Running compute power in the cloud is becoming the standard way to run virtual servers, application services as well as high performance computing. Using older approaches such as onsite data centres and servers with virtualisation has become costly and underused. Often the capacity is not fully used and there is also the cost of hardware maintenance.
By migrating your existing compute workloads to the cloud you can reduce cost, maintenance and increase your reliability and up time. You can migrate your virtual machines (VM's) directly into cloud platforms with minimum or no downtime. Once in the cloud you can then only focus on the management of the software layer and not hardware.
These days its become fairly standard to migrate existing on premises VM's into the cloud despite which hypervisor platform you are using i.e VMware or Hyper-V. You are also able to Physical 2 Virtual physial servers and migrate these to cloud. Please be careful to check your chosen cloud platforms operating system requirements prior to starting any migrations.
HPC High Performance Computing
Another very interesting use of cloud computing is for high performance computing (HPC) using large scale batch compute tasks to run huge loads like rendering. This can be much easier and cheaper than trying to build and run this in an on premise data centre. In the cloud you only pay for what you use and not the spare unused capacity. In HPC you may not be constantly running these workloads so you will not pay for unused compute time.
IaaS and PaaS
You are able to run compute functions in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) whereby you manage and look after your own infrasructue or VM's or via Platform as a Service (PaaS) were you can directly spin up specific functions like web apps that run in the cloud. IaaS may be more suited to a business looking to import existing infrastructure into the cloud and PaaS may be better suited to developers not interested in maintaining any infrastructure.
Containers
Containers are pretty much the future of running applications in the cloud (or even on premises) and with using solutions like Docker and Kubernetes the process of deploying containers has become much easier. In the cloud you can use the relevant cloud platforms Kubernetes engines to spin up containers in seconds and to mange them going forward. Google Cloud's GKE is really leading in this space with Microsoft's AKS which has just become GA (Generally Available) quickly catching up. I will be writing a blog post post about Containers in the near future as this is becoming a really hot topic in cloud computing.
Serverless Functions
Serverless and functions are used by developers to write and run code immediately and not have to deal with any servers or infrastructure at all. Code can be directly run and actioned without any need to worry about capacity planning or server management. Of course there are servers required but these are all managed by the cloud platforrms.
Serverless Functions
Serverless and functions are used by developers to write and run code immediately and not have to deal with any servers or infrastructure at all. Code can be directly run and actioned without any need to worry about capacity planning or server management. Of course there are servers required but these are all managed by the cloud platforrms.
https://cloud.google.com/products/compute/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/product-categories/compute/
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