Considerations to Optimize Container Management
Design a custom reference architecture that meets your requirements.
Do you experience challenges with the following:
- Equipping IT operations processes to manage containers.
- Choosing the right container technology.
- Optimizing your infrastructure strategy for containers.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Plan ahead to ensure your container strategy aligns with your infrastructure roadmap. Before deciding between bare metal and cloud, understand the different components of a container management solution and plan for current and future infrastructure services.
- When selecting tools from multiple sources, it is important to understand what each tool should and should not meet. This holistic approach is necessary to avoid gaps and duplication of effort.
Impact and Result
Use the reference architecture to plan for the solution you need and want to deploy. Infrastructure planning and strategy optimizes the container image supply chain, uses your current infrastructure, and reduces costs for compute and image scan time.
Considerations to Optimize Container Management
Design a custom reference architecture that meets your requirements.
Analyst Perspective
Containers have become popular as enterprises use DevOps to develop and deploy applications faster. Containers require managed services because the sheer number of containers can become too complex for IT teams to handle. Orchestration platforms like Kubernetes can be complex, requiring management to automatically deploy container-based applications to operating systems and public clouds. IT operations staff need container management skills and training.
Installing and setting up container orchestration tools can be laborious and error-prone. IT organizations must first implement the right infrastructure setup for containers by having a solid understanding of the scope and scale of containerization projects and developer requirements. IT administrators also need to know how parts of the existing infrastructure connect and communicate to maintain these relationships in a containerized environment. Containers can run on bare metal servers, virtual machines in the cloud, or hybrid configurations, depending on your IT needs
Nitin Mukesh
Senior Research Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations
Info-Tech Research Group
Executive Summary
| Your Challenge | Common Obstacles | Info-Tech’s Approach |
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The container software market is constantly evolving. Organizations must consider many factors to choose the right container management software for their specific needs and fit their future plans. It's important to consider your organization's current and future infrastructure strategy and how it fits with your container management strategy. The container management platform you choose should be compatible with the existing network infrastructure and storage capabilities available to your organization. |
IT operations staff have not been thinking the same way as developers who have now been using an agile approach for some time. Container image builds are highly automated and have several dependencies including scheduling, testing, and deployment that the IT staff is not trained for or lack the ability to create anything more than a simple image. |
Use the reference architecture to plan for the solution you need and want to deploy. Infrastructure planning and strategy optimizes the container image supply chain and reduces costs for compute and image scan time. Plan ahead to ensure your container strategy aligns with your infrastructure roadmap. Before deciding between bare metal and cloud, understand the different components of a container management solution and plan for current and future infrastructure services. |
Your challenge
Choosing the right container technology: IT is a rapidly changing and evolving market, with startups and seasoned technology vendors maintaining momentum in everything from container platforms to repositories to orchestration tools. The rapid evolution of container platform components such as orchestration, storage, networking, and system services such as load balancing has made the entire stack a moving target.
However, waiting for the industry to be standardized can be a recipe for paralysis, and waiting too long to decide on solutions and approaches can put a company's IT operations in catch-up mode.
Keeping containers secure: Security breaches in containers are almost identical to operating system level breaches in virtual machines in terms of potential application and system vulnerabilities. It is important for any DevOps team working on container and orchestration architecture and management to fully understand the potential vulnerabilities of the platforms they are using.
Optimize your infrastructure strategy for containers: One of the challenges enterprise IT operations management teams face when it comes to containers is the need to rethink the underlying infrastructure to accommodate the technology. While you may not want to embrace the public cloud for your critical applications just yet, IT operations managers will need an on-premises infrastructure so that applications can scale up and down the same way as they are containerized.
Common ways organizations use containers
A Separation of responsibilities
Containerization provides a clear separation of responsibilities as developers can focus on application logic and dependencies, while IT operations teams can focus on deployment and management instead of application details such as specific software versions and configurations.
B Workload portability
Containers can run almost anywhere: physical servers or on-premise data centers on virtual machines or developer machines, as well as public clouds on Linux, Windows, or Mac operating systems, greatly easing development and deployment.
“Lift and shift” existing applications into a modern cloud architecture. Some organizations even use containers to migrate existing applications to more modern environments. While this approach provides some of the basic benefits of operating system virtualization, it does not provide all the benefits of a modular, container-based application architecture.
C Application isolation
Containers virtualize CPU, memory, storage, and network resources at the operating system level, providing developers with a logically isolated view of the operating system from other applications.
Source: TechTarget, 2021
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