In the space of just a few years, virtual servers have changed the face of application deployment, and now power the vast majority of what we refer to as the cloud.
Virtualized machines provide amazing value for money compared to bare-metal servers, and they come with more efficient utilization of finite hardware resources. They also create possibilities around scalability and are rapidly imaged and duplicated. Backups, deployments and snapshot restores of entire environments are simple, quick, and make services more reliable.
Containers are the next logical virtualization step, with relatively few resources needed from each physical server, due at least in part to the minimal OS overhead taken by a container.
But other than the return on investment in terms of smaller resource footprints, why are containers proving so popular in business contexts?
Containers allow the creation of entire applications based on microservices. That’s a modular application build model that’s already aligned with agile development methods. Containers are portable and platform agnostic too, ensuring that containerized applications and services operate consistently in just about all environments.
Today’s container management frameworks such as Kubernetes allow the rapid release of new application code. That reflects the quick, business-driven changes necessary in today’s competitive environment. Development of new applications and services need not be held back by purely resource-focused concerns.
Containers are portable across development, test, and production environments, and have shorter cycle times, which fit better with agile DevOps processes. Efficient lifecycle automation provided by container management systems enable enterprises to deliver new capabilities faster.
Container management platforms such as Kubernetes support the easier introduction of new code, and an iterative, improvement-based development mindset. As organizations’ needs change, production deployments can be on-premises, in the cloud (public or private), and back, or can be spread in multi-cloud models (any combination of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and so forth).
All that said, there are significant challenges for an organization creating its own container management framework. Environments based on Kubernetes require significant investment in testing and maintaining complexity. The solution is SUSE Container as a Service (CaaS) Platform, an enterprise-ready platform that allows companies to get all of containerization’s benefits, without having to lose value from existing hardware investments, or redeploy precious staffing resources (people and training).
SUSE CaaS Platform runs on bare-metal in-house (on compatible hardware), or in public or private clouds, or indeed, any combination — just like containers themselves. The easy deployment of SUSE CaaS Platform means your Kubernetes environment will be up and running fast, so you can deploy modern applications on a highly resilient platform, using the very latest in DevOps practice.
SUSE CaaS Platform provides scalability that is secure and is built on industry-standard technologies already familiar to your developers and IT teams. At the core of SUSE’s containerization is Micro OS, a version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server developed for containerized environments. It uses the same kernel as its big brother, so there’s no overhead in terms of another operating system to support, nor any need to have to reskill.
Production-ready Kubernetes provides the open-source standard for container deployment and management, and SUSE CaaS Platform is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) certified Kubernetes distribution. The certification means that you can switch at will from one (certified) distro to another, and cloud and/or on-premise Kubernetes instances will integrate seamlessly.
Containers empower organizations with rapid delivery of applications that are infrastructure and platform agnostic. That means a business can react as quickly as it needs to changes in its commercial landscapes, without complicating resource needs.
Source: Techwireasia
