Containers are a standard unit that packages codes and their dependencies for the applications to run smoothly in any computing environment. They are lightweight, portable making them suitable for deployments of larger applications.
It requires fewer resources compared to the standard virtual machine, which is a boon if you plan to run more containers than the VMs on the server. Deployment in any environment and on any OS is possible once you build the application containerize it.
Reduce Cloud Costs using Containers, since they do not require an operating system unlike virtual machines. Containers are compact and use the host’s operating system to protect the source code, runtimes, system tools, and libraries as isolated units. Move and deploy these containers easily on different platforms having different environments.
Select from various billings models to reduce cloud cost :
- Pay As you Go – Usage Based Billing Model
- Pay-Per User Model
- Fixed Subscription Based Model
- Combination of Models
Astonishing tricks that can help you reduce cloud cost :
- Serverless computing, i.e. not paying for individual servers but its functions.
- Buy reserved and spot instances especially for the short term projects.
- Managing the cloud traffic and data storage in the cloud for faster processing of data.
- Proper asset management to save costs shut down the unused resources, selecting the right type of instance and setting up auto scalability.
- Utilize cloud management and cost monitoring tools to watch the spending on the cloud, prevent cloud sprawl.
- Design single cloud systems to avoid the costs of internal data transfer.
- Offloading reduces the quantity of data carried across a network and frees bandwidth; Content Delivery Network (CDN) can do web traffic offloading.
- Move data to low cost archiving and storage services within the same cloud to reduce cloud cost.
- Create alerts about the usage and billing and if required change plan
- Migrate selected apps to the cloud that has a higher demand
- Control groups with kernel feature of LINUX, which ensures that each container uses the CPU, memory, and network required to run the applications
- Private and public images can be handled by means of the reusability feature of repositories
Why use Containers?
The primary reason for the organization to run applications on the containers is increased agility, save infrastructure costs, increase speed, and efficiency of development team. It supports microservices architectures and avoids lock-in due to use of multiple cloud platforms.
The statistics of companies adopted containers on cloud signify its future.
Almost 75% of global organizations will have containerized applications by year 2022.
The most developer-friendly environment to run containers is Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services 42.5%, 28.9%, and 26.3% respectively.
The public cloud provider that supports hybrid and multicloud deployments are Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services 42.9%, 30.1%, and 25.3% respectively.
The public cloud that provides best value for money is Microsoft Azure 38.5%, Google Cloud Platform 29.5%, and Amazon Web Services 29.3% as per a survey.
Percentage of cloud adoption by enterprises currently using AWS is 76%, Azure 69%, and Google cloud 69%.
Know the benefits of Containers to Reduce Cloud Costs :
- Containers are light weight as they run directly on the Kernel of hosting Operating System
- Lesser system resources required than the traditional systems or virtual machines
- Containers take less space than VMs
- Container creation helps to combine multiple images even if extracted from repositories.
- No need for debugging as applications run the same irrespective of their deployment environment
- Containers virtualizes the operating systems not the hardware to make containers more portable and efficient
- Easy deployment of applications running in containers to multiple operating systems reduce cloud cost
- Container API supports the creation, distribution, and management of containers
- Accelerates development , testing and production cycles
- Split monolithic applications into smaller modular microservices for easier management
- Reduce Cloud Cost and gain overall consistency in operations regardless of their deployment
- Speedy deployment, scalability and higher efficiency saves time and efforts to add or remove applications from an environment
- With isolation the applications are safe in the containers
- Multiple containers can run on the same machine
- Containers can handle more applications using lesser operating systems and virtual machines
- Container Stacking is highly effective as it isolates the individual processes of every app
- Stacking makes sharing of same operating system (OS) possible for each app which interfering with the process of other app and reduce cloud cost
- Assign more resources to the workloads in an environment than the infrastructure can actually support concurrently. This is possible when all the workloads aren’t active simultaneously
- Assigning more workloads lets you save on costs with high virtual machine to host stacking ratio
Challenges in the path to reduce cloud cost by using containers are security, data management, multi-cloud data center support, networking, and disaster recovery. Storage challenges using containers is the scalability of storage with the number of containers, provisioning takes long time and the legacy storage technologies are not a perfect fit for container workloads.
Steps towards secured containerized applications:
- First and foremost is data encryption
- Runtime monitoring and runtime protection by blocking abnormalities
- Scanning registries and continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD)
- Hardening clusters and hosts
Reduce Cloud Costs with the promises containers make for public cloud deployments. Emphasize agility and scalability in software delivery to safeguard expenses.
Aim to reduce cloud cost yet acquire benefits of consistent runtime environment, higher efficiency, portability, and secured virtualization of the containers.
