Businesses need to innovate faster to stay ahead of the competition. Increasingly businesses are adopting cloud computing, containers, and microservices for rapid application delivery. While these latest cloud-native technologies can help them deliver faster, they also introduce new challenges. Cloud-native applications are complex, and have a lot of moving components that require end-to-end automation for deployment and management.

While there are several tools that attempt to address container management, in reality they also add more overhead and complexity. The already busy DevOps teams are now tasked with operating and managing the complex clustering, scheduling, and management tools in addition to their cloud applications. This additional overhead can potentially negate the very benefits of cloud computing.

An alternate approach is to use a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, such as Nirmata, to automate the deployment and management of these cloud-native applications. SaaS has already been widely adopted worldwide for business applications (Salesforce for CRM, Carbonite for online backup, and so on). Recent trends show that agile high-performing businesses are also adopting SaaS for Application Infrastructure Management leading to the popularity of tools such as  AppDynamics and New Relic.

In his article, Outsource the Hassle, Stay In Control: 10 Advantages of Software as a Service, Dan Twing, President and COO at EMA, provides several excellent reasons for choosing enterprise SaaS solutions, such as continual technology enhancements, increased reliability, easy accessibility, 24X7 support, increased reliability, increased security and reduced risk.

Here are the top three reasons why customers are choosing Nirmata, a SaaS for application container management:

• Faster Time to Value: Time to value or (TTV) represents the time it takes for a new product to provide its advertised value to a new customer. Therefore it is  important for companies that adopt SaaS solutions to minimize time-to-value in order to reduce churn and expand customer lifetime value. Nirmata fully automates the complex operations and management of application containers across various cloud providers thereby minimizing the deployment time of applications and allowing businesses to deploy, integrate, operate, monitor and manage several different tools.  

• Lower Risk – Most of the risks to select and implement new software are almost eliminated through Nirmata because of low upfront cost, pay-as-you-go model, and minimal staff time to get going. The project is more likely to be on-time, there are no hardware costs or other infrastructure surprises.

• Scaling Up –  Nirmata is a scalable cloud platform that aggregates and correlates user activities with events across containers and hosts.  The goal of Nirmata is to help enterprise DevOps teams focus on their areas of expertise, and offer a lightweight, non-intrusive, non-opinionated solution for managing cloud applications.  

In summary, adopting container technology is not enough to drive business agility. There is a significant need to manage and operate containerized applications, without introducing additional complexities and the hassle of managing complex scheduling, clustering, and management tools. By allowing enterprises to easily leverage best practices for application and infrastructure management; Nirmata eliminates barriers for development and operations teams and equips them with self service automation.

At Nirmata, we are committed to empower your DevOps team to deliver and manage containerized applications by lowering the adoption tax and also eliminating cloud provider lock-in. Interested in learning how we are helping deliver world-class applications? Watch our demo and sign up  for a free trial.

Image Credit: “DSC_4633” (CC BY 2.0) by Wonderlane