Containerized apps are quickly becoming a top priority for businesses all around the world.
Containers have grown in popularity as a strong solution for solving various essential concerns of application developers in recent years. These concerns include the need for faster delivery, agility, mobility, modernization, and life cycle management, to name a few. Containers provide a solution that addresses all of these essential concerns.
Gartner anticipated that by 2022, more than 75% of enterprises worldwide would be running containerized apps in production. It now predicts that global revenue from container management will reach $944 million by 2024.
This rapid acceptance, however, is not synonymous with maturity. Many teams and organizations are still in the early stages of deploying containers in production.
So, while it may appear that you've missed the boat, this is just not the case. To recast the original cargo ship metaphor, they are massive ships, and there is always another one preparing for the next voyage.
It is true what they say: You must begin somewhere. However, operating containerized workloads in production isn't something you'll want to jump into without first doing some planning and preparation.
Here are four tips for laying a solid foundation.
1. You need a plan: Equip yourself with the required skills and prepare for adjustments
A single team cannot own and manage container adoption throughout the organization. Because containerization projects take time and money, they must have the support of all key teams, including security, infrastructure and operations, networking, and application development.
New technology implementations are often time-consuming, so technical experts must encourage active communication among project teams, particularly those from app development, infrastructure, and operations.
Containers provide a technology framework that is aligned with the DevOps philosophy; therefore, DevOps-minded enterprises are better able to manage the problems of containerization.
Many of the solutions necessary for container deployment in production are available as commercially supported, open-source-based products with enterprise licensing.
Whether an organization decides to use open-source components or just commercial goods, its teams will need to adopt new operational approaches to successfully manage containers.
To achieve a speedy onramp and long-term consistency in managing these new and complicated solutions, technical professionals must provide proper training for their people.
2. Don't worry about the learning curve
According to conventional opinion, legacy apps will eventually need to be rebuilt (also known as refactoring) or replaced in order to reap the full benefits of cloud computing. However, there is no law stating that you must begin there.
While containers are usually thought of as a cloud-native technology (and hence a natural fit with things like microservices architecture), they may also operate as a monolith (and you can also operate a container on-premises).
Furthermore, if containerization is part of a wider application migration project in your organization, you have options. This is fantastic news for teams that may find the containerization learning curve overwhelming.
Some enterprises may find that their near-term application migration plans do not require the use of containers. A recent Konveyor.io community survey discovered a variety of application migration options, including simply rehosting for the time being, even as a preamble to reworking later on.
And, if reworking (or replacing with a greenfield project) is the aim, make sure you have the time and resources to execute it right. If the goal is to modernize apps, teams must be willing to devote time to re-architecting the systems as microservices.
Microservices are essentially functional components with standardized APIs that can be combined into modern-day apps or integrated into traditional enterprise applications. Currently, 75% of microservices-based apps run on containers, with 20% planning to do so within the next 12 months and 5% having no such plans. As a result, the transition to microservices is a significant driver of container usage.
Another alternative is to embrace Kubernetes while outsourcing operational responsibilities. OpenShift, for example, is a family of Kubernetes-based solutions that may run on a number of platforms, including as a public cloud service in which a significant portion of operational expense is essentially outsourced.
Commercial or managed container platforms might be a benefit for teams that are already at capacity or lack the necessary skills and experience, especially in a tight labor market. This can make container adoption more feasible for businesses that lack certain required expertise.
3. Master the art of infrastructure automation
Container deployments usually require automation and management via CLI (command line interface) or API (application programming interface).
Containers are quite difficult to manage manually at scale due to the high degree of container life cycle churn and the need for quick startup and shutdown. Despite the fact that container management systems include dashboards that provide visibility into the deployment, most operational operations must still be performed via a CLI or API.
It is important for technical professionals to select container management tools that provide visibility through dashboards, but they must also expect to interact with their deployments exclusively via CLI or API and not GUI (graphical user interface).
Another key objective is transitioning to declarative management, which totally relies on the DevOps team, which determines the application's state.
Security and compliance checks are also critical components of the application management lifecycle process. Declarative automation and container administration aid in achieving cross-platform scalability and portability quickly.
4. Taking a holistic approach to container security
It is important to take a holistic approach to container security when securing containerized applications managed with Kubernetes.
Containerization (together with orchestration) can improve security, but like other possible benefits, it is not free. Container and Kubernetes security necessitate new approaches and ways of thinking. Part of the reason for this is that some of the other benefits, like faster development, change your risks.
The idea is to provide those benefits while avoiding unnecessary hazards. Policies and methods for ensuring your developers use approved trusted container images while avoiding bottlenecks
Finally, to summarize, containerization can be persuasive due to its benefits in accelerating app delivery cycles. However, it is essential to examine business use cases, host and hardware dependencies, configurations, and variables, among other factors that can reduce the operational complexity of application containerization.
It is generally a good idea to start small while implementing large-scale improvements. But perhaps a more appropriate approach would be to develop incrementally rather than small. This allows you to maintain control without surrendering to larger goals.