Containers are one of the most talked about things in the industry right now. Even companies that build good ol’ traditional apps are quickly updating themselves and are willing to spend time, money, and other resources to keep up with the trend. Companies are looking at avoiding downtime at all costs, make sure they can scale as quickly as they can, reduce the time and effort involved in deploying large-scale enterprise applications. Containers are a one-stop solution for all these problems. Containers surely make development workflows easier, they make it seamless to pack more onto your existing hardware.

While this seems very exciting for any developer, the fact remains that upgrading existing applications, tools, and processes, is not that simple. Containers are still going to make you work a lot.

To use containerization at scale involves a lot of overhead that is not talked about much, and to use Apps containerization effectively you need a ton of supporting resources. Aggregating these resources at scale, and in a consistent manner, could be a tedious and a time-consuming task.

What are these containerization resources that we are talking about?

* Clusters – More and more enterprises are using Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration platform, to automate the management of applications. Managing large clusters demands expertise that is not easily and readily available in the market. And even at a medium scale, this work is best automated and not done using manual tools.

* Auto-recovery – Large enterprises run critical applications at scale, any node or a service that is not responding needs to be recovered or replaced. You need a system that can continuously monitor all the nodes and take action in case of a mishap.

* Automated resource optimization – Infrastructure is expensive; being billed for unused resources is the last thing a company would want. Companies have to come up with a solution that can automatically do this without human intervention.

* DevOps Workflows – To become a top-notch DevOps organization, the team has to prioritize automation. A workflow gives a centralized place to create all automation, which serves as a glue between processes and system.

* Docker Image Registry – While docker hub provides a free platform to upload your images, anything you upload is also public. As a competitive business, you would not want to do this and will likely need your own private image registry

* Advanced monitoring –  The team should know the status of each component in the system; a platform which gives you the status of all the elements in the system. And how do you correlate these metrics by application, environments, and teams which requires additional analytics on top of metrics provided by Kubernetes.

* Alarm system – The team should be notified in case something is not normal. This will help the team to take quick action, without risking the stability of the system.

Now that we have listed some of the key resources needed for effectively using containers at scale, we need to figure out how to get these resources efficiently.

There are different startups providing each of the service listed above. However, integrating all the solutions is not only an expensive option but another overload that the company has to take. So a company that just wanted to make things easier, ends up making things complicated and extremely difficult to understand.  

What if I told you there is an application platform that gives you everything I mentioned? What if you considered containerization as a service?

Nirmata to the rescue!

Nirmata is a complete containerization solution to deploy, operate, and optimize Kubernetes applications and clusters at enterprise scale. In addition to the services mentioned above, Nirmata also provides various other helpful functionalities like governance, additional security and an abstraction that enables engineers to manage all their applications without detailed knowledge about how it works behind the scenes.

Nirmata provides a great user interface that is intuitive and well designed, which is vital to access a complex application. Nirmata has taken special care about the user experience and has not compromised it in order to build an API rich application. The interface leverages APIs to enable all the product capabilities, making it a very valuable product.

If you are looking for Apps containerization and want to solve all the problems listed above, then Nirmata’s containerization as a service is the best bet. To learn even more, watch our demo on containers via Kubernetes here. You can also contact Nirmata with any questions you may have or to discuss our Kubernetes container-as-a-service solution offerings.

Lastly, we’re fond of this blog post that helps to explain the joys and power of containerization even further. Enjoy!