4 Cloud Container Competitive Advantages

Containerization already plays a strategic role in 20% of global organizations, and 70% are reporting plans to adopt cloud containers within the next 6-18 months. What makes a cloud container so useful in DevOps environments? Containers are a form of operating system virtualization. They’re used to run microservices or software processes to a larger application. Developers can deploy applications in any environment (whether on-prem or in the cloud) on a secure and consistent basis, resulting in simplification and acceleration of build, test, and deployment pipelines.

In this article, we’ll explore the many benefits of using cloud containers for DevOps processes and success. Let’s take a look at the top 4 cloud container competitive advantages.

1. Greater Portability with Cloud Containers

A common roadblock developers face is the inability to quickly and simply deploy applications to different environments. Running applications in cloud containers, allows developers to deploy these applications on multiple and disparate operating systems and hardware platforms. 

Greater portability enables developers to test applications and determine whether a given application performs differently on separate operating systems. Apps can be tested in an isolated environment which protects the production system from corruption should the app crash during testing.

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2. Cloud Containers Increase Operational Efficiency

Containers are lightweight so they don’t bog down pipelines with long wait times. Instead, they actually help enable rapid deployments. All without sacrificing security!

In comparison to Virtual Machines (VMs), containers are just a few megabytes in size whereas VMs weigh a few GB. Therefore, developers can run many cloud containers rather than 1 or 2 VMs. This makes it possible for developers to:

• Increase server density
• Reduce data center and cloud costs
• Use fewer resources to speed up deployments
  

3. Boost Scalability with a Cloud Container

Similar to enhanced efficiency, cloud containers offer improved scalability. This is due to having a small disk size that can be easily shared and managed. To put it simply, horizontally scaling applications is easy with containers because developers can:

• Create multiple instances of the same application
• Run any number of containers needed to serve application loads

In addition, containers enable microservices architecture. Microservices allow developers to build new components of applications to meet the changing customer and market demands. Due to being distributed and loosely coupled, microservices can be deployed and scaled on a granular level. Modern microservices architecture enables enterprises to rapidly scale up or down, allowing the organization more flexibility and agility for deploying applications and managing data. Now, your application data is more agile and scalable than ever!

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4. Enable Recovery and Enhance Security

Think of containers as security guards that look out for each other. Even if one container fails, other containers running on the same operating system are not affected. This is because containers operate in isolation. So, if data in a container crashes or a developer makes a mistake causing the container test to fail, only this container will be affected by the corruption. All other containers will continue to perform as usual. Thus, cloud containers boost security by inhibiting one container from harming the rest.

Final Thoughts

With Kubernetes adoption increasing across DevOps organizations around the globe, it’s easy to understand why cloud container adoption is also soaring. In fact, cloud container usage increased across the board in 2020 and is likely to continue to rise beyond 2021. If you’re looking to gain a competitive advantage in 2022, it’s time to adopt containers. ionir can help. 

Get in touch with us and begin your free trial of the ionir container-native data platform built in Kubernetes.