Four tips to easily handle cloud containers
Cloud containers will not disappear in the short term. To adopt and keep your container running efficiently, please follow the following four suggestions.
Cloud container technology, as a substitute for traditional virtualization management programs, is dominating the cloud market. The container is lightweight and provides enhanced portability, allowing applications to migrate between platforms without requiring developers to redo or re architect applications. However, although developers are amazed by its benefits, containers still face many challenges, such as scalability and management issues.
The massive demand for containers has led enterprises to launch various cloud container services. With so many choices in the market, it is difficult to decide which container platform or tool to use. Before you understand the choice of cloud container technology, you must first determine whether the container is worth your enterprise's time to study. The following four cloud container techniques can help you clarify your choices.
Decide whether cloud container technology is suitable for you
Container technology is a rapidly growing IT trend, but that does not mean it is suitable for your organization. The container provides an option for server virtualization. However, since containers rely on a single operating system and must be migrated to servers with compatible operating system cores, porting them will bring more challenges than migrating traditional virtual machines (VMs).
On the other hand, running on a separate operating system can reduce costs and improve performance. The container also eliminates redundant resources required by virtual instances, thus improving performance. With the lightweight design of containers, a server can host more containers and take advantage of their scalability.
If you do not want to choose between the container and VM based hypervisor, these two options can be used at the same time to address specific needs respectively.
Select the best cloud container platform
Docker brings the cloud container to the spotlight. However, before you jump directly into the container world, you must decide which cloud container platform to use. Each container and its applications share the kernel of the host operating system. When selecting a platform, please consider your server's operating system and determine which container platform is compatible with it.
It is difficult to choose a cloud container platform because they are similar in function. When you shop around, remember your need for containers. Compare and evaluate various functions, such as virtualization function, network isolation and root permission isolation. Pay attention to the functions of managing and monitoring processor, memory, I/O, storage limit and other resource management. After determining that a platform can meet the specific standards of your enterprise, evaluate the licensing model and cost.
Tools for extending and orchestrating cloud container technology
Although cloud container technology is known as a new way to run applications, its challenges remain. Scalability remains one of the major obstacles. To help solve scalability problems, specific methods and tools can be used, such as Docker Swarm and Google Kubernetes.
Container orchestration tools manage how container services interact with each other to help improve their scalability. Orchestration tools allow cloud containers to run on clusters and improve scalability as workloads increase. Docker Swarm and Google Kubernetes are two common container orchestration tools that focus on cluster management and scheduling.
Instead of using third-party orchestration tools, organizations can also create a customized container management system. Using automated testing tools to focus on container security and management and verify container based application architecture can also help improve container scalability.
Container monitoring promotes new IT tools
The IT department of an enterprise must use a special cloud container monitoring tool, especially to understand the relationship between various containers. With the continuous expansion of the size and scope of many containerized environments, monitoring tools have become the key to success.
The Docker indicator can tell developers whether a service is running or stopped, but it cannot determine whether the application performance meets the standard. The complexity of the container environment requires professional monitoring tools, such as Ruxit, which can understand repeated behavior and usage patterns, and Datadog, which can discover the relationship between a database table scan, Web server connection, and cache hit.
