How Containerization in the Cloud Reduces Vendor Lock-in
As you accelerate your organization’s containerization in the cloud, key stakeholders may worry about putting all your eggs in one cloud provider’s basket. This combination of fears — both a fear of converting your existing (or new) workloads into containers, plus a fear of being too dependent on a single cloud provider like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud — can lead to hasty decisions to use less-than-best-fit technologies. But what if using more of your chosen cloud provider’s features meant you were less reliant on that cloud provider?
The Core Benefit of Containers
Something that can get lost in the debate about whether containerization is good or worthwhile is the feature of portability. When Docker containers were first being discussed, one of the main use cases was the ability to run the container on any hardware in any datacenter without worrying if it would be compatible. This seemed to be a logical progression from virtual machines, which had provided the ability to run a machine image on different hardware, or even multiple machines on the same hardware. Most container advocates seem to latch on to this from the perspective of container density and maximizing hardware resources, which makes much more sense in the on-prem datacenter world.
In the cloud, however, hardware resource utilization is now someone else’s problem. You choose your VM or container size and pay just for that size, instead of having to buy a whole physical server and pay for the entirety of it up-front. Workload density still matters, but is much more flexible than on-prem datacenters and hardware. With a shift to containers as the base unit instead of Virtual Machines, your deployment options in the cloud are numerous. This is where container portability comes into play.
The Dreaded “Vendor Lock-in”
Picking a cloud provider is a daunting task, and choosing one and later migrating away from it can have enormous impacts of lost money and lost time. But do you need to worry about vendor lock-in? What if, in fact, you can pivot to another provider down the road with minimal disruption and no application refactoring?
Implementing containerization in the cloud means that if you ever choose to move your workloads to a different cloud provider, you’ll only need to focus on pointing your tooling to the new provider’s APIs, instead of having to test and tinker with the packaged application container. You also have the option of running the same workload on-prem, so you could choose to move out of the cloud as well. That’s not to say that there would be no effort involved, but the major challenge of “will my application work in this environment” is already solved for you. This can help your Operations team and your Finance team to worry less about the initial choice of cloud, since your containers should work anywhere. Your environment will be more agile, and you can focus on other factors (like cost) when considering your infrastructure options.
Further Reading
- 5 Ways to Get Started with Container Optimization for Automation and Cost Savings
- Cloud Container Services Comparison
- The Next Evolution of Cloud Management: Container Management
Originally published at www.parkmycloud.com on March 5, 2020.
