The benefits of containerized applications

The verdict is in, and Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto container orchestrator for businesses across the globe. According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), there are more than 109 tools on the market to manage containers, and 89 percent of them are for Kubernetes.1 Kubernetes and container orchestrators are taking the software development world by storm. This new technology makes building and maintaining applications even faster and easier

Containers isolate the independent functions that work together to make up an application. Isolated containers can also be updated and patched without impacting other microservices in the application, resulting in less (or zero) down time. Containerized applications are also more secure as the isolated nature makes it harder for a security breach to spread from container to container.
 

The challenge

With new technology always comes new challenges. Containerization adds a layer of abstraction to your cloud environment that makes it hard to see which applications are using resources and incurring costs. Your cloud bill will show a total charge per compute resource (e.g., node), but because each node powers several apps, you have no idea how much compute power each application used, or how much it costs.
 

Optimize containers for cost and performance efficiency

The CloudHealth agent can be deployed to each cluster in your environment to gather information about available resources and how they are being allocated to workloads. CloudHealth can then group, categorize and display this data, helping you answer questions such as:

  • Who is consuming my cluster resources?
  • Do I have the right infrastructure supporting my clusters?

Figure 1: Container costs broken down by business unit.

CloudHealth provides you granular visibility into cluster resource consumption. With CloudHealth, you can:

  • Make decisions with complete visibility – CloudHealth looks inside your container clusters and determines how much of each shared resource is being used by each of your services or applications, and what it costs. With the CloudHealth Perspectives grouping engine, you can also view resource consumption by any cost center that matters to you, such as team, department or line of business. Understand your consumption patterns for better capacity planning, trending and forecasting.
  • Reallocate containerized costs – Using cost redistribution rules, you can perform accurate showback or chargeback, reallocating cluster costs to the business groups that incurred them. With a few simple clicks, you can understand current consumption patterns and drive accountability with your development teams.
  • Optimize your infrastructure for containers – CloudHealth reveals container resource allocation and provisioning data that helps you answer questions such as:

–Do we provision enough resources for what my cluster is requesting?

–Do we have the right infrastructure to support my cluster?

CloudHealth lets us maximize the value of our container deployment by telling us how well utilized it is and whether our clusters have the right mix of resources supporting it. That level of insight enables us to make informed, strategic business decisions without additional overhead.
— Director of Engineering Yelp
1. DevopsCube. “16 Best Container Orchestration Tools and Services.” Bibin Wilson. January 5, 2022.


Understand which teams, departments or applications are driving containerized resource costs. CloudHealth® provides visibility into Kubernetes services on any cloud and for Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS).

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