Table of Contents: |
Introduction |
What Do you Mean by Container Management: Use Cases and Benefits |
How to Manage Containers: Follow these 5 Steps |
5 Container Management Best Practices |
The Path Forward |
A study by Gartner shows that more than 75% of organizations globally will be rolling out containerized applications, a steep 30% increase from the previous year. While on the surface this may sound great, the execution reality is contradictory. Majority of the organizations, by far, are not yet adept at managing their existing container platforms and ecosystems. This is exacerbated by the fact that IT teams lack the technical maturity to deal with the rising complexities and costs of deploying containers in production. So, how can IT and I&O leaders deploy the right container management strategy to resolve the challenges in the production environments? Read this blog
What Do you Mean by Container Management: Use Cases and Benefits
In simple words, Container management refers to the process of automating and simplifying the development, deployment, and scaling of containers. This process also extends to adding, replacing, and monitoring containers at large scale.
But how can organizations streamline the overall management of container systems? Container management is an end-to-end process comprising container architecture planning, containerizing applications, deployment and orchestration on hosting platforms, storage, security, virtual network management systems, and monitoring. In this way, IT teams can easily start and restart containers, stop when required, and monitor its health status.
Depending on application design and resource allocation, enterprises can draft policies that include when a container can or cannot share a host. This can be explained with a simple scenario. For instance, IT teams should either co-locate containers to prevent latency or adopt an anti-affinity rule to stop storage overload. IT heads can spin up container instances to meet sudden demands and ensure that containers communicate among distributed applications without enlarging the attack surface to cyber threat actors.
Having a container management strategy guides an organization in automating orchestration, monitoring, networking, log management, and load balancing of containerized application workloads. In this way, they can manage containers with intense resource requirements without the need for human intervention.
How can you enhance your operational agility through containerization? Read this blog
5 Steps to Effective Container Management
Prioritize
It's better to kickstart a container management strategy with applications with frequent code updates and complex design interfaces. A fail-fast, fail-often approach helps the organization to adapt to the changes in containers in real time.
Building a Skillset
Not just technical development, but a container management strategy should include process and people changes. These range from support, education, security, and training to governance and updating service level agreements.
Accelerating Transformation
Add applications that require containerization. These mostly include legacy and clustered applications. Migrating monolithic containers can help in refactoring these applications by applying new CI/CD codes and DevOps practices. Do note, that not all applications require containerizations though, some run better on Virtual Machines (VMs).
Building a CI/CD Pipeline
Adopting CI/CD deployment practices can help in enhancing the container's capability to release new code effortlessly.
Leveraging Orchestration
Using orchestration tools such as Kubernetes can help to quickly churn out containerized applications, manage their operations automatically on cloud or multiple hosting platforms, and scale workloads as and when needed for disruption-free functioning.
Continual Assessment
Keeping in tandem with the fluctuating business demands, organizations must evaluate regularly to prioritize applications that require containerization.
5 Best Practices to Container Management
Own your Container Management Journey with Cloud4C
Over the past years, though organizations have given the green signal to containerization adoption, limited operational know-how and technical expertise remain a key challenge. Cloud4C, one of the leading managed services providers, offers best-in-class containerization and container management services, backed by the 24*7 support of 2000 experts.
As a leading Container management solutions provider with a strong presence across America, APAC, and MENA, Cloud4C has helped leading organizations build, deploy, and manage container engines and platforms without having them spend additional expenses on extra tools or technologies. More often than not, these container environments were deployed on private or hybrid cloud environments to meet data locality laws or streamline in-country operations. , Beyond containers, Cloud4C experts take of the entire application lifecycle that includes application migration and hosting, application management, application modernization, data modernization, containers deployment and management, DevOps, application security, DR, and more.
To know more about our container management offerings, visit our website or get in touch with our representative.