The corporate world has undergone a change thanks to cloud computing. For completing business operations, enterprises heavily rely on cloud platforms. The growing popularity of remote work has increased demand for cloud computing as well. To support remote work, businesses prefer to deploy virtual machines on cloud platforms. Virtual machines can be used by remote employees to host business applications and access computer resources. Enterprises can increase service availability with the use of virtual machines hosted in cloud environments and cloud-native monitoring.
Even though cloud platforms seem beneficial, there are cost concerns for enterprises. They must deploy several virtual machines to host enterprise applications and support remote employees. To reduce cloud costs, companies have started to focus on containerization. Read on to understand the cloud cost issues and how containerization is the solution.
A company hasn’t achieved everything by moving to a cloud environment. To maintain corporate activities, a completely secure virtual infrastructure must be built. It includes hosting virtual machines in cloud environments without a need for specific hardware. These virtual machines, however, are unable to simultaneously host all corporate applications. Only a few business applications may run on a single virtual machine, and others may not function properly. It occurs because various software dependencies and computational needs can vary between enterprise applications. When several services or applications are running on the same virtual machine, the dependencies appear to clash and service availability suffers.
Virtual machines lack flexibility. One can configure a virtual machine to run certain applications. However, you will not prefer to configure a virtual machine at frequent intervals. If you must configure a virtual machine before running an enterprise application, there will be a loss of time and service availability. A virtual machine will not automatically adapt to the changing needs of every application. To fulfil real-time application needs, containerisation is the only solution. It solves the problem related to application resource duplication in cloud environments. Let us understand how containerisation leads to reduced cloud costs.
Recognizing the idea of containerisation
Before comprehending the financial benefits of containers, it is vital to understand the notion of containerization. Containerization is not a recent idea; it has existed for many years. However, the popularity of containers grew in 2013 when several open-source platforms were launched. A container is a lightweight executable that only includes a few dependencies and OS libraries. The OS libraries and dependencies within a container will be enough to run the concerned application.
Since a single container will consist of the application and its dependencies, there is no need for additional help. The executable can run individuals in a cloud-native platform. There is no need to link an entire application with the operating system under consideration. By doing so, one will not have computation power left to run another enterprise application. Containerization is the process of shifting to executable containers in cloud-native platforms. It is a step further from virtual machines and opens new possibilities for corporate entities.
With the help of containerization, enterprise applications are written once and run anywhere. Also, the portability of enterprise applications increases significantly with containerization. Compared to a virtual machine, a container is lightweight and requires less time for deployment. A container will only share the operating system’s kernel and not the entire operating system. Since the start-up time is less, enterprises can boost service reliability.
Understanding how containerization minimises the cost of using the cloud
Many businesses have previously used containerization to cut their total cloud costs. Here’s how it may assist your company in cutting cloud-related costs:
Enhanced portability
With the help of containerization, you will design the software package only once. It means the application along with its dependencies will be written only once. The lightweight executable can be deployed to different operating systems. The application is bound to the operating system of the host. Since you don’t have to write applications every time, you will hire fewer software developers. Companies having in-house developers will reduce the manual burden by asking to write the code only once.
Improved agility
The faster the speed of software or application development, the less money is spent. When the application development process goes on for a long period, companies have to invest additional funds. For the same rationale, companies focus on agile development to increase the speed and launch new applications faster. Containerization does not act as a hindrance in the agile development process. Several open-source platforms allow enterprises to package applications that run on Windows, Linux, and other operating systems. Since the enterprise is not compromising on agile development or service reliability, it will boost its ROI.
Better speed within cloud environments
Decreased speed and downtime within cloud environments prevent a company from doing business. The financial losses due to downtime within cloud environments are high. With the help of containerization, enterprises will increase the speed of application deployment. When the speed of deployment is high, companies have a chance to boost ROI. Also, license and server costs decrease when the start-up time is less for an application/software.
Containerization for Fault Isolation
Enterprises spend more funds on fixing faults within cloud environments. Since a single fault might hamper service reliability, enterprises are quick at fixing vulnerabilities. However, cloud experts face difficulties in determining the root cause of a fault. Since each container will be a separate entity and free of dependencies on other containers, fault isolation will become easier. Cloud experts will know which application is disrupting the service reliability in real-time. As a result, enterprises will spend less on fault isolation and resolution.
Conclusion
Given the rising demand for remote work and cloud computing, containerization and cloud-native monitoring are essential. It will assist a business in quickly deploying applications in a cloud environment. A business will save money on servers because the deployment time will be shorter. Additionally, containerization promotes fault isolation. To uncover a flaw, businesses don’t necessarily need to stop all their apps and lower their ROI. While containerization might ease the strain, why spend more money on cloud computing? Reduce your cloud costs right away by deploying containers!
