Containers: The Next Big Thing in Cloud Migration Modernization
During the past decade, digital transformation has enabled enterprises to move from legacy systems to virtual systems. This leads to the reduction of physical systems, as multiple virtual machines can run on a single system. In this process of evolution, containers were developed and utilized to lessen the weight of application development, as they contain only application-relevant data centers/libraries and fit easily into any infrastructure. Containers influence major technical areas and play a key role in DevOps, cloud, etc. This role continues to grow, paving a faster path to quality applications.
When an organization migrates to a new infrastructure, it requires addition of new features, components and resources that make the process cumbersome and critical to manage. This is why we need to strategize and formulate the best approach for cloud migration.
The lift and shift migration, also known as rehosting, deals with lifting an entire application from its old environment and shifting it to cloud without any change in code. This is a simple approach that requires minimal effort to move an application and helps in faster migration and deployment. But this may cost more while operating on cloud and doesn’t take advantage of the native features of a cloud platform.
Apart from this lift and shift migration, we can migrate by leveraging containers. Containers are not a new concept and have been around for several years now. It is all about compartmentalizing the systems and shifting them from one platform to the other.
Benefits of Leveraging Containers for Cloud Migration
Reduced complexities: Employing containers removes dependencies on cloud service providers and decreases the complexities of handling the platforms. They are like customized compact domains that support every chunk of the application with an independent environment to run.
Maximized portability: Due to dependencies, guaranteeing portability in a manual process is difficult. However, using automation migration or reconfiguration between containers helps to increase the magnitude of portability. This enables the application to run when migrated from one platform to another without compromising the quality.
Better distribution: Containers are capable of running on multiple cloud platforms based on their utilization. Organizations broke applications into different components to run on different cloud platforms. Later, they brought these components together for better optimization.
Improved Efficiency: Due to this optimization and distribution fashion, applications become more scalable and independent of environments. For instance, if there is a sudden demand for an application, we can provision extra containers with zero modification.
Enhanced security: Containers not only help in migration but also serve as a road map to IT modernization by updating and modifying applications, adhering to the changing trends. This results in improving cloud security and governance services.
Lift and Shift vs. Containers
With all the above descriptions, we shall now derive the pros and cons of lift and shift approach and containers.
| Methods | Containers | lift and shift |
| Pros | · Better portability
· Higher scalability · Saves resources · Decreases development time · Better flexibility in distributed computing |
· Saves costs and time
· Reduce on-premise cost · Faster and easier in simple migrations |
| Cons | · Security risk
· Monitoring requires separate management · Lesser flexible with multiple OS. |
· Increases long term cost
· Ineffective utility of cloud |
Despite the challenges that containers bring, we can consider it as the next big thing in the modernization journey of cloud migration. We shall explore their viability in the coming years to create a positive impact in this IT era, especially as they provide exceptional chances to revolutionize the cloud migration process.