Why Your Company Should Adopt a Container Strategy to Reduce Cost and Improve Developer Productivity
Can cost reduction and improving the productivity of developers go hand in hand? It might sound counterintuitive at first, but helping companies increase their revenue while saving on costs and streamlining the development process is exactly what containerization is all about.
What is containerization?
When you package together all of the software code within a container along with all the necessary components such as dependencies, libraries, and frameworks, you have achieved containerization.
Why is it important?
The application within the container can be moved to any environment and can run on any infrastructure completely independent of that environment’s operating system and other various specs. The container is essentially a fully functional and portable computing environment.
How does that make the developers’ job performance more efficient?
Instead of coding on one platform or specific OS—doing which resulted in incompatibility issues that created bugs, glitches, and errors which the developers would spend a lot of time fixing—a contained application can be moved across any platform or any infrastructure and perform optimally on all of them without any bugs or glitches since it already contains everything that it requires to run successfully.
The term to summarize that independence is environment agnostic. Containers are exactly that, which means that the developer team gets to spend less time configuring the environment and can implement cost-saving practices.
Benefits of a container strategy
With a well-organized containerization strategy that contains the best practices and operational plans that will assist in driving digital transformation by accelerating the development, testing, and deployment of applications, we can improve business agility, complete application security, and independence of the application from the underlying infrastructure.
Other benefits include:
- Less overhead: Since containers require fewer systems resources than traditional virtual machines, there will be less overhead as containers don’t require complete operating system images.
- Portability: All the applications that run in a container can be deployed to different hardware platforms and multiple different operating systems, making them truly portable.
- Consistency: DevOps teams know that applications will run in the same manner regardless of where they are deployed, making operations more consistent.
- Efficiency: With containers, applications can be deployed, scaled, or patched with greater ease and much faster.
- Improved Development Process: Since containers support DevOps efforts to accelerate development, test, and production cycles and also support agile, the whole development process becomes vastly improved.
Our role
With all its benefits, there’s just one catch. Implementing a container strategy is difficult. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. As a consulting company that is focused on this precise implementation, we can help make the process easier.
Some steps we can achieve that are:
- Security: We embed security in the DevOps process and secure the contained environment throughout its life cycle, i.e., the build/development process, deployment, and the run phase of the application. Other security-related practices include providing whitelisting, anomaly detection, and behavioral monitoring.
- Monitoring: Rather than monitoring physical hosts, we’ll be focused on container-specific and service-oriented monitoring.
- Storage: Providing a storage platform that’s integrated with the developer workflow can help increase the agility, availability, and performance of the workload.
- Orchestration: Container orchestration is the automation of the deployment, management, scaling, and networking of containers. An example of an orchestration tool would be Amazon’s ECS (Elastic Container Service) or if you want an open-source example, Kubernetes is a popular option.
With a great container strategy in place, the benefits are yours to reap. The bottom line is that they all revolve around saving costs whether they are infrastructure costs, management costs, or maintenance costs.
