Cloud computing has been a revolution in the corporate world. Enterprises depend heavily on cloud platforms to complete business operations. The demand for cloud computing has also increased due to the rising use of remote work. Enterprises prefer hosting virtual machines on cloud platforms to support remote work. Remote employees can use virtual machines to access computing power and host enterprise applications. With the help of virtual machines hosted in cloud environments and cloud-native monitoring, enterprises can boost service availability.

Even though cloud platforms seem beneficial, there are cost concerns for enterprises. They must deploy several virtual machines to host enterprise applications and support remote employees. To reduce cloud costs, companies have started to focus on containerization. Read on to understand the cloud cost issues and how containerization is the solution.

Understanding the cost-related issue with cloud computing

By shifting to a cloud environment, a company has not achieved everything. There is a need to create a full-proof virtual infrastructure to continue business operations. It includes hosting virtual machines in cloud environments that do not have hardware requirements. However, these virtual machines cannot host all business applications at once. A single virtual machine might host only a few business applications, while others might fail to work. It happens because each enterprise application might have different software dependencies and computation requirements. When multiple applications or services are hosted on a single virtual machine, the dependencies seem to clash, and service availability goes down.

Virtual machines lack flexibility. One can configure a virtual machine to run certain applications. However, you will not prefer to configure a virtual machine at frequent intervals. If you must configure a virtual machine before running an enterprise application, there will be a loss of time and service availability. A virtual machine will not automatically adapt to the changing needs of every application. To fulfill real-time application needs, containerization is the only solution. It solves the problem related to application resource duplication in cloud environments. Let us understand how containerization leads to reduced cloud costs.

Understanding the concept of containerization

Before understanding the cost benefits of containers, it is essential to understand the concept of containerization. The concept of containerization is not new and has been around for many decades. However, the popularity of containers grew in 2013 when several open-source platforms were launched. A container is a lightweight executable that consists of a few OS libraries and dependencies. The OS libraries and dependencies within a container will be enough to run the concerned application.

Since a single container will consist of the application and its dependencies, there is no need for additional help. The executable can run individuals in a cloud-native platform. There is no need to link an entire application with the operating system under consideration. By doing so, one will not have computation power left to run another enterprise application. Containerization is the process of shifting to executable containers in cloud-native platforms. It is a step further from virtual machines and opens new possibilities for corporate entities.

With the help of containerization, enterprise applications are written once and run anywhere. Also, the portability of enterprise applications increases significantly with containerization. Compared to a virtual machine, a container is lightweight and requires less time for deployment. A container will only share the operating system’s kernel and not the entire operating system. Since the start-up time is less, enterprises can boost service reliability.

How does containerisation lead to reduced cloud costs?

Containerization has already helped many enterprises to reduce overall cloud costs. Here’s how it can help your organization reduce cloud-related costs:

Increased portability

With the help of containerization, you will design the software package only once. It means the application along with its dependencies will be written only once. The lightweight executable can be deployed to different operating systems. The application is bound to the operating system of the host. Since you don’t have to write applications every time, you will hire fewer software developers. Companies having in-house developers will reduce the manual burden by asking to write the code only once.

Increased agility

The faster the speed of software or application development, the less money is spent. When the application development process goes on for a long period, companies have to invest additional funds. For the same rationale, companies focus on agile development to increase the speed and launch new applications faster. Containerization does not act as a hindrance in the agile development process. Several open-source platforms allow enterprises to package applications that run on Windows, Linux, and other operating systems. Since the enterprise is not compromising on agile development or service reliability, it will boost its ROI.

Increased speed within cloud environments

Decreased speed and downtime within cloud environments prevent a company from doing business. The financial losses due to downtime within cloud environments are high. With the help of containerization, enterprises will increase the speed of application deployment. When the speed of deployment is high, companies have a chance to boost ROI. Also, license and server costs decrease when the start-up time is less for an application/software.

Fault isolation with containerization

Enterprises spend more funds on fixing faults within cloud environments. Since a single fault might hamper service reliability, enterprises are quick at fixing vulnerabilities. However, cloud experts face difficulties in determining the root cause of a fault. Since each container will be a separate entity and free of dependencies on other containers, fault isolation will become easier. Cloud experts will know which application is disrupting the service reliability in real-time. As a result, enterprises will spend less on fault isolation and resolution.

In a nutshell

Containerization and cloud-native monitoring are a must, considering the increasing demand for remote work and cloud computing. It will help a company deploy applications quickly within a cloud environment. Since the deployment time decreases, a company will save on server costs. Also, containerization helps with fault isolation. Companies don’t have to shut down all the applications and reduce their ROI to find a fault. Why spend additional funds on cloud computing when containerization can reduce the burden? Deploy containers right away for reduced cloud costs!