The need for the rapid evolution of technology to make our daily lives easier has made a tremendous shift in the way the world builds software. Today, more applications are built for the cloud rather than for on-premises server infrastructure and if we are to detail out the benefits of cloud computing in 2021, it will be a childish affair.
To help build more reliable and scalable applications, there has been a fundamental change in how solutions are architected. Traditional monolithic application architectures have now given way to microservices.
Studies conducted globally point out that nearly 92% of enterprises have experienced some form of success with microservices.
As more love for microservices escalates on a global scale, the focus should also be on facilitating the seamless performance of applications having a microservices-oriented architecture. Today, the developer community at large follows the path of containerized microservices for developing applications with microservices architecture.
According to Gartner, nearly 75% of all global organizations will have containerized applications in production by 2022.
Container technology offers portability for microservice applications by enabling the creation of an encapsulated and isolated runtime environment for any kind of microservice or application module. It is lightweight and offers resources such as libraries and binaries needed for the application to deploy and run without disruption.
Containerized microservices are becoming increasingly popular as they offer a consistent virtual environment that empowers an application right from the time it was coded by a developer in their computing device to the final stage where they are deployed at any public or private cloud infrastructure.
Additionally, here are four reasons why everyone loves to use Container-Based Microservices:
Better Execution Environment Efficiency than Virtual Machines
Virtual Machines (VM) have been around for quite some time and have allowed thousands of enterprise applications to easily avail partitioned virtual computing power and execution environments. However, VMs run by virtualizing a computer, and hence each VM requires its own instance of an operating system. Provisioning a single VM for each microservice would not be cost-effective and leveraging the same VM for multiple microservices could result in conflicts arising between applications on the use of common libraries or computing resources. Containers eliminate this problem as they can sustain an operational environment for the microservice on its own.
Freedom of Choice
As explained earlier, a container-based microservices carries its own execution environment to wherever it is deployed. Hence, developers can choose to build their microservices in their desired programming language and technology stack. From an enterprise point of view, they can choose a cloud service that is most appropriate for them in terms of price and performance since containerized microservices can be deployed in any public or private, or hybrid cloud environment. Besides, there will not be a need to constantly hire new professionals with skills in diverse programming languages.
Maximize Utilization of Server Resources
A large application may be composed of hundreds or thousands of microservices. By containerizing them and orchestrating their operations through platforms like Kubernetes, it is possible to achieve optimal utilization of server resources. Some microservices may require extra processing power while some may require more network resources. Depending on the application scenario, container-based microservices can easily adapt through smart orchestration of workloads according to unique requirements. Multiple microservices can operate seamlessly on a single server with no avenue for conflicts and the right resources would be allocated on-demand thereby preventing wastage as well as eliminating delays or performance lags.
Failproof Reliability
When traditional cloud-native applications were deployed using VM’s alone, there were problems with reliability. The failure of a VM would result in the entire application running on it going down and a restart of a VM would take a considerable amount of time. When using container-based microservices, the event of a VM failure will not result in disruptive effects. It allows for the replication of the microservice application in a cluster of smaller VM’s and these can continue to function thereby guaranteeing availability.
The future of digital lies with cloud-native applications and enterprises are in a race to build the most superior ones for their customers. Demanding a high degree of availability, performance benchmarks, and seamless user experience, these applications would have to accommodate the needs of billions of digital-savvy consumers from across global markets daily. This would mean handling unimaginable volumes of complexity and configurations that will be quite hard for traditional monolithic applications. Containerized microservice-oriented application architecture is the way forward as we explained here.
It all boils down to how well organizations can manage their container networks and enable seamless scaling of the microservice applications running in each container on demand. This is why Gartner predicts that by 2024, there will be a USD 944 million worth of market size for container management software!
Is your enterprise ready to benefit from this technology trend?
