While a few large companies like Johnson & Johnson got the rid of all their Mainframe-based applications and expect to run more applications in the Cloud than they currently do on their own infrastructure, the great majority of the Forbes Global 2000 organizations are still stuck at the beginning of the journey. If these large shops have initiated their move to the Cloud to reduce infrastructure costs, they’ll soon be confronted with technological, cultural and psychological hurdles which may hinder them to take full advantage – cost reduction, but also business value – of the Cloud. In this blog post series, we detail how to “lift & extend” and the pragmatic keys to establish a virtuous circle in your Cloud adoption strategy.
Today, many IT departments think they’re done with the Cloud journey since they achieved the
“lift & shift” of their applications to IaaS. Of course, they succeeded in virtualizing their infrastructure by making applications run on VMs, which significantly reduce on-premises infrastructure cost and effort. However, stopping the Cloud journey here could be very limiting:
Application resource duplication
Because in a Lift & Shift approach, the Operating System and application resources are replicated on each virtual machine.
Infrastructure resource waste
The CPU, memory and storage space is defined upfront at the VM level and cannot easily be adapted to the real application needs (especially when the audience peak is not predictable or constant over time).
Lack of flexibility
VMs cannot be easily manipulated across on-premises, private, public or hybrid, Linux/Windows Cloud environments.
In order to really take full advantage of Cloud’s cost saving opportunity, operation and provisioning flexibility, legacy application containerization (also known as CaaS for Container as a Service) should be strongly considered. This step further in the Cloud journey abstracts infrastructure (physical or virtual) resources and provides the following advantages:
- Higher scalability and lower operating expenses: the underlying running environment (OS, middleware, libraries, technology stacks, etc.) can be mutualized between different containerized applications, infrastructure resources are smartly consumed (elastic consumption that avoids waste of CPU, memory and storage)
- Easier reuse and deployment of safe and up-to-date components for a smarter application lifecycle management
- Better time to market (shorter delay between feature implementation, integration and deployment in production)
In addition of these immediate gains, CaaS offers one of the greatest opportunities to reconcile Dev and Ops teams, working closer together on common and shared concepts, practices and tools (DevOps, implementation of CI/CD pipelines, Docker, Kubernetes, Apache Mesos, etc.). This is a mandatory aspect for those applications that are envisioned to go to PaaS.
The articles below will help you better understand the value of CaaS for your organization and how to work with containers:
“CaaS as your new platform for application development and operations”
By Betty Junod (Senior Director Product Marketing at Docker)
Read the article on Docker.com
“Cross-Platform Hybrid Cloud with Docker”
By Chanwit Kaewkasi (Maintainer at Docker Swarm Project)
Read the article on Medium.com
“Relation of Middleware to Microservices, Docker, and Cloud-Native Architectures”
By Kai Wähner (Technology Evangelist at Confluent)
Read the article on DZone.com