AWS Container Services in Cloud Computing
Transcript:
Hi, I’m Todd Bernson, Senior Enterprise Architect at Blue Sentry Cloud and an AWS ambassador with all 11 AWS certifications.
I’m often asked by IT executives how can their teams deliver their containerized applications or microservices securely, simply, and cost-effectively.
Well, it shouldn’t surprise you that the choice of platform is a critical step.
I can tell you from experience that I’ve seen teams deploy their apps with the same on-prem legacy methodologies.
Without exception, it leads to huge problems with speed, security, cost, and innovation in the cloud.
Instead, for those who are deploying a greenfield technology or refactoring their apps to become more cloud-native, AWS is the best choice, providing several options for running your containerized applications in the cloud.
One option is to choose EC2 with container orchestration tools loaded, such as Docker Swarm or Kubernetes setup with cube ADM.
For smaller deployments, ECS, including ECS Fargate, is a well-suited managed container orchestration platform, and finally, EKS is AWS’s managed Kubernetes platform which is the standard for large enterprise-grade microservice applications.
Success Factors for Application Deployment
In my experience, several factors are vital to the success of application deployment.
Setup and Maintenance
First, there’s ease of setup and maintenance.
A managed service like ECS or EKS is ready for your apps in just minutes and is always up to date.
Contrast that with the hardware operating system model, which must be constantly maintained, patched for security vulnerabilities, and is subject to hardware failure.
Application Complexity
Second is the complexity of the application both today and tomorrow.
Applications with a small number of microservices can run effectively on solutions like Docker Swarm on EC2 or ECS or ECS Fargate.
For more complex deployments or for highly regulated industries, there’s EKS.
It can handle complex, high-number microservice applications, and the more complex the application, the more EKS allows for customization.
Cost of Setup and Ongoing Maintenance
Third, in my experience, is cost.
Though the three options provide cost-sensitive alternatives, EC2 is the cheapest option from a hardware perspective, especially with reserved instances.
However, an organization must consider the added cost of setup and ongoing maintenance.
ECS Fargate provides a serverless option allowing you to scale up vertically and only pay for the compute resources that are used.
EKS has the ability to automatically scale nodes with node groups providing a great deal of savings especially if you use spot instances for a portion of those nodes.
Custom vs. Managed Solutions
The fourth, and final, consideration is customization.
Depending on your business’s needs and staffing requirements, you may decide to forgo some customization options available in Kubernetes in exchange for a completely managed solution including managed deployment like Fargate.
Whenever your goal is choosing the right solution will deliver you enhanced security resiliency, elasticity, and greater cost savings as your application needs grow with your business.
We, at Blue Sentry, would be excited to help you analyze your needs and help you to best decide which AWS services are right for your application.
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