Organizations are increasingly deploying innovative solutions to deliver high-quality products and services at agility, across the globe. Cloud service providers like AWS have created a secure, scalable, and highly reliable infrastructure and managed services platform where businesses can build and operate their IT systems. But this progress is incomplete if the organization cannot scale the highly complex distributed systems, deploy IT applications across multiple ecosystems at a fast pace. Such modernized approaches on the cloud are best achieved with containers and microservices architecture. AWS Cloud provides a number of services to run containerized workloads and perform container orchestration. But before you start considering implementing AWS-powered containerization and microservices architecture, there are a few important things you should know.
68% and 67% of professionals find deployment velocity and ease of management the top motivating factors for moving applications into containers worldwide in 2021
What Are Microservices
Traditional applications have monolithic architectures that control their components and functions from a single node. A microservices architecture splits the monolithic application into multiple services that perform specific functions. These services are part of that application predominantly and have unique logical functions for their application. Such a modular architecture allows faster delivery, deployment, and upgrade of code/software segments in addition to easy testing and proofing for runtime, development errors. Best achieved on cloud platforms such as AWS, microservices enable DevOps and enterprise functions adopt agility and flexibility by design.
The global cloud microservices market is expected to reach a value of $1.7 billion by 2027, with a CAGR of 12.7%
Microservice architecture counters the problems created by monolithic applications. Some of the benefits of microservices are:
- Developers work on a smaller codebase and accelerate the development process. This reduces the dependencies and complications that arise with a monolithic application.
- Microservices define the roles and responsibilities of developers clearer, which makes updates, reviews, and deployments faster.
- Microservices can leverage different languages as the application doesn’t depend on a particular library.
- Microservices make continuous delivery easier.
Microservices and Containerization
Microservices and containerization are both software development practices that make the applications faster performing. This is achieved by transforming a monolithic application into a collection of smaller yet scalable and portable services. This is why microservices and containerization work so well together. Microservices, when developed within a container is portable, agile, and vendor compatible.
Containers and microservices powered by AWS Cloud’s services and solutions can help businesses level up their application development and delivery process. AWS Cloud can efficiently manage the infrastructure requirements which will save the enterprises from bearing additional costs on infrastructure, servers, network, and other hardware. The overall combination would make the microservice and container-based applications faster and secure.
How Containerization Mitigates Microservice Architecture Related Challenges
Despite the seamless and hassle-free nature of microservices, there are a few drawbacks to microservices. It can be challenging to track which hosts are running specific services. Certain changes in microservices without any additional resources to keep track can increase the costs exponentially.
This is where containers actually come to the rescue.
Linux containers can help mitigate challenges like over-provisioning and expenses that may occur with the microservices architecture. Containers running on the same hosts are isolated through the use of kernel interfaces. This isolation makes deploying microservice very easy, irrespective of how many languages and frameworks it is using. Containerization is a viable solution because of its well-architected boundaries that make them generalized to be deployed across any ecosystem, any device at ease:
- A container is not allowed to access all the filesystems, it can only access a designated part of it
- The container is not allowed to use CPU or RAM
- Not bounded to networking systems
Container deployment and container management platforms like Docker and Kubernetes enable the storage of applications with all the necessary codes, system tools, libraries, and settings through which the developers can work seamlessly in any environment.
Choosing The Right Container Management Platform on AWS Cloud
AWS Cloud has certain services that simplify container orchestration. Choosing the right container management platform will help your business build a responsive and robust containerization and microservices platform. The business should choose the best one as per their further requirements.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) - ECS is AWS’s native solution to run and manage containers in ECS clusters.
Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) - Amazon EKS helps organizations run Kubernetes without having the need to install and configure Kubernetes control plane or worker nodes.
AWS Fargate - It is a compute engine for ECS and EKS through which you can run docker or Kubernetes containers without the burden of managing servers and clusters. Fargate makes it easier to scale servers without worrying about provisioning compute resources for container apps.
Elastic Beanstalk - Elastic Beanstalk leverages Amazon EC2 and S3 to deploy, manage and scale web applications. You can run Docker-based applications on Elastic Beanstalk. It also allows defining a custom runtime environment.
‘Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)’ is also available for AWS Cloud users to store and manage Docker images.
Once you finalize the platform to run and manage your containers it’s time to start building the right container management platform.
How to choose the Right Container Management System
The right container management system should consider security, networking, and backup are primary factors while building a container management system. AWS Cloud doesn’t provide its
Networking - AWS offers multiple networking services and components that an enterprise can choose according to their needs. AWS networking services are highly reputed among brands that use them to optimize their Cloud activities. With AWS networking services, a business can meet their network solutions through products like Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS Direct Connect, etc.
Security - A robust container management platform needs to operate in a secure environment. In the case of AWS, it is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer. To understand your security requirements, you must consider factors like host, images, access, and secrets. These factors will play a major role in securing your containers on AWS.
Cloud4C would also take care of your security requirements during the process of container and microservice development.
Backup and Recovery - AWS Cloud has a backup service that makes it easy to centralize and restore the backup of data across AWS services in the cloud as well as on-premises. Apart from this, Cloud4C and its team of experts will also create additional provisions for backup, recovery, and disaster recovery depending on your requirements.
Overview of the Container Build Process
The container build process refers to the cycle of how workloads can be containerized and build microservices-based applications. A few points that you need to keep in mind in order to ensure the smooth function of this cycle are:
- CI/CD should be integrated across all environment
- AWS services are used to integrate with the Monitoring, Logging, and Application Performance Monitoring and Tracing system
- There must be a strict review, feedback, and approval process in place. This can be easily achieved with AWS CodePipeline
How to Standardize Container & Microservices Development Framework
Container and microservices can only work together when certain factors on which both are dependent are standardized. Standardization plays a key role in speeding up the transformation process through faster integration with the DevSecOps pipeline. One needs to make sure that standard platform images are in place. A standard pipeline that has the ability to handle different platform images for container build and delivery is also required. Apart from this CI/CD pipeline is also supposed to be standardized as it makes the software development process secure and faster. These standardized practices help enforce compliance and governance standards.
Why Choose Cloud4C for Container & Microservices Development on the AWS Cloud?
Adoption, development, and migration of container technologies and microservices architecture on AWS Cloud is a highly responsible task. At Cloud4C, our experts will help you find the right languages and frameworks while implementing an enterprise-wide containerization & microservices platform on Amazon Web Services. You can achieve a smooth functioning architecture without any additional expenses on unnecessary tools or solutions. Being the world’s leading cloud MSP, Cloud4C ensures end-to-end management of your DevOps ecosystem on the AWS cloud: application modernization via microservices, workloads and data modernization, containers deployment and management, DevOps security with DevSecOps, and more.
