When talking about containers it’s inevitable to think about modern application built natively for the cloud, but the reality for most companies is that the majority of, if not all, their applications still traditional applications and probably they will still that way for many years to come.
Does that mean you cannot join the containers party ? ABSOLUTELY NOT !!!
One of vSphere Integrated Containers use cases is target specific for you, Application Repackaging;
What it means is that you can take your traditional application, monolithic or even a 3-tier application and repackage them as containers, without having to change a single line of code.
You don’t even need to change all layers of your application, start simple. Containerize only the web/presentation layer and give it a try.
You will immediately see the benefits of running applications within containers, like:
- Faster Recovery: in case of disasters, you don’t need to recreate your VMs, patch them, install app, configure etc.. just instantiate a new image in a matter of seconds and you are back in business;
- Easy scale-out: adding a new node to an application is just as simple as running a new container, just select the same image as a base source and it’s done;
- Faster life-cycles: upgrading a container with a new application is much simpler and faster, you can upgrade your application in minutes;
- Portability: container images are becoming the de-facto application delivery method, just because it runs anywhere, desktops, vSphere Infrastructure and to the cloud without any modification what so ever.
And it’s not all, with vSphere Integrated Containers every container is a VM, so you also get all vSphere benefits:
- Increased availability: leveraging High Availability (HA), in case of hardware failures, your containers will be restarted automatically on another healthy host, reducing your downtime and increasing your application availability
- Predicted performance: Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), will make sure your container gets the performance it needs, moving the VMs/containers around to load balance the workload among the hosts of your cluster, ensuring the ESXi host has the free resource it needs to fulfill your containers needs.
