Containers have become the standard output of the development process, and Kubernetes has emerged as the standard for container orchestration platforms. With Kubernetes, containers can be managed by clusters in public cloud, hybrid cloud, and even in a multi-cloud environment.
In this article, we’ll discuss:
- Deploying Kubernetes
- Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS)
- Advantages of serverless CaaS platforms
- Serverless CaaS offerings
- Getting the serverless experience on any cloud
If you are new to these topics, Cloud Academy offers introductory courses that explain the fundamentals: Introduction to Containers and Introduction to Kubernetes.
Deploying Kubernetes
Deploying and managing Kubernetes on your own is hard, which is why managed Kubernetes services have emerged as a streamlined way to deploy containers in the public cloud. Managed Kubernetes is evolving, and serverless containers are slowly are becoming a norm.
When running Kubernetes at scale, managing, operating, and scaling its infrastructure to maximize cluster utilization — without suffering from idle resources — can be a big challenge. There are too many your development team needs to manage and configure. This includes selecting the best instance type and size, determining when to scale up or down, and making sure all of the containers are scheduled and running on the best instances — and that is even before starting to think about cost resource optimization.
What is Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS)?
The success of Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) shows that developers and DevOps teams don’t want to provision the underlying virtual machines or servers. They want to deploy their applications without the operational overhead. While FaaS offerings cater to running functions based on event triggers, there is further innovation in the market where automation is extensively used to support other application architectures using containers: Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS).
Advantages of serverless CaaS platforms
- Improved productivity – No operational overhead associated with managing the virtual machines. This not only serves as a cost saver by reducing the operational costs, but also increases the velocity of application delivery by removing friction points through automation.
- Simple to scale – Since management of underlying virtual machines is the responsibility of the cloud provider, scaling is even more seamless.
- Greater efficiency – With serverless CaaS, users pay based on the container size rather than the virtual machine size. This is more cost efficient than paying for virtual machine instances.
The resource efficiencies offered by serverless CaaS makes it more attractive for developers and the enterprises are increasingly adopting serverless CaaS to cut down their operational costs and streamline the DevOps pipeline. Along with FaaS, most cloud providers are also offering serverless CaaS to meet the needs of containerized applications.
Serverless CaaS offerings
Cloud providers make use of automation to provide the developers with easy hooks to deploy containerized environments without any need to manually provision and manage the virtual machines. While useful, these services are far from being cost-effective and fully featured. In addition, when you are running on multiple clouds, you would have to learn and manage multiple services. Here are some examples:
Getting the serverless experience on any cloud
Spotinst Ocean lets you deploy containers without worrying about infrastructure management, while gaining deep visibility and dramatically optimizing costs. By providing an abstraction on top of virtual machines, it allows you to deploy Kubernetes or any containerized cluster to any cloud without the need to manage the underlying VMs.
Spotinst Ocean provides a true serverless experience by introducing a new, three-layer approach of automating and optimizing containers workloads:
- The pricing model layer – Spot, On-Demand, and Reserved Instances.
- The instance sizing layer – Choosing the right infrastructure size and type to satisfy the actual containers requirements.
- The containers utilization layer – Changing in real time the limits and resource requests of the containers based on their consumption and utilization.
Summary
Modern application architectures require a more elastic infrastructure, and CaaS makes it easy to use the infrastructure resources more efficiently while providing the flexibility to run many different workloads. While every cloud provider has a CaaS offering to help its consumers deploy modern applications, SpotInst Ocean lets you deploy containerized applications on any cloud provider by tapping into spot instances and reserved instances. SpotInst Ocean provides both resource efficiencies of CaaS along with additional cost efficiencies using analytics and automation, with many market-leading organizations using it with great satisfaction.
Learn more
Join our upcoming “Serverless Containers” webinar on August 28, 2019 to learn how you can run your Kubernetes cluster without managing and operating its underlying infrastructure. We’ll discuss the different services provided by cloud providers and third-party products.
Kevin McGrath, CTO at Spotinst, Tomer Hadassi, Solutions Architects Team Lead at Spotinst, and Thomas Mitchell, Azure Researcher & Trainer at Cloud Academy, will introduce a new approach to automating and optimizing container workloads. This approach will reduce cloud costs and operational overhead, while improving efficiency and performance.
By joining this webinar, you will learn more about:
– Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS)
– The rise of containers and Kubernetes
– Automating, managing, and optimizing container workloads
– CaaS solutions, including a detailed technical demo from Spotinst Ocean
– Reducing infrastructure costs and improving performance
