A developer’s best friend but can cause immense trouble for the operations team who take care of data centre hardware. Containers can impact different teams in different manners. This makes it essential to follow certain practices to manage infrastructure in a containerized environment optimally. Here are some essential points to note.
1. The importance of learning
Containers are a relatively new technology, and not many people are familiar with it yet. In order to effectively employ their use in production, companies need to educate and train their employees on how the technology works. The sooner the employees can familiarize themselves with it, the smoother can be its implementation in operations.
2. Plan in advance
Before adopting containerized workloads, it is vital to understand some basic components like placing the container workload, altering the configuration in the case of fluctuations, allowing more flexibility without adversely affecting the final performance, etc. Companies need to understand how to size the workload and where to place the workload. Having a clear view of the resources required to handle the fluctuations as and when they occur is also helpful.
3. Better monitoring
Many companies use tools for legacy monitoring that do not support a containerized environment. Instead, organizations should use tools that allow monitoring at a service level along with providing a container.
4. Automation is necessary
Enterprises need to cautiously select network management tools. Generally, traditional networking processes are unable to match the container portability of the creation speed. Moreover, data centres that are dependent on containers also find networking hard. Many professionals suggests that software defined tools work well with containers.
5. Storage is key
A crucial point to note is that containers require backup. Workloads normally access stored data over the long term. Containers, on the other hand, exist for only a couple of hours and sometimes even minutes. In addition to this, not all the tools and procedure in an organization support containers. Therefore, it is important to have back up. Companies need to regularly back up their data to capture containers that run and shut, all withing the day.
6. Preparing security
Containers are safer than VMs. However, from the point of view of security vendors, containers can be riskier than other workloads. This is why it is essential to work with security managers to protect containerized workloads. Organizations need to use security tools and tools for monitoring.
