Are You Realizing the Cloud Optimization Benefits of Kubernetes and Containers?

Businesses of all sizes are moving their workloads to the cloud to gain scalability, faster time-to-market, increased application portability and more. But cloud adoption is rarely a simple lift-and-shift project. That’s why many organizations are struggling to modernize their applications to ensure their cloud investments are paying off.  

Two technologies have risen to the surface in cloud management — Kubernetes® and containers. Kubernetes is a system for deploying applications and efficiently using the containerized infrastructure that powers them. It provides management and support services that deliver secure Kubernetes operations across distributed clouds.

In the ever-evolving modern IT landscape, containers have emerged as a transformative force. They enable businesses to streamline development and deployment processes like never before. With containerization, applications can be broken up into microservices, which can be simultaneously used by multiple applications.

The primary benefits of Kubernetes and containers

Modern businesses are deploying Kubernetes and containers to gain a wide range of business advantages, including better delivery metrics, accelerated digital transformation and faster time-to-market.

One of the biggest benefits of Kubernetes and containers is that they help organizations fully realize the promise of hybrid and multicloud environments. Other benefits include:

• Kubernetes makes applications more portable, allowing them to move easily between different clouds and environments, including on-premises environments.
• Containers can be spun up and down quickly, improving the efficiency of the entire IT stack and allowing applications to easily scale as demand fluctuates. 
• Kubernetes can save organizations money because it takes less manpower to manage IT and makes applications more resilient and efficient.
• Containerized microservices are easier to work with, easier to update and more secure than large, monolithic applications.
• Containerization can make testing and deploying applications faster and more efficient.
• The ease of use can lead to faster cycle times for rolling out new services.

Harnessing the power of containers

While Kubernetes and containers have emerged as key technologies that support IT transformation, even medium-sized businesses often lack the skills to implement and manage them well, especially within complex Kubernetes environments.

Microservices and the containers that house them must be tightly managed and orchestrated to ensure the functionality they provide is available when it’s needed. Container orchestration platforms, like Kubernetes, are highly complex and require experienced IT staff to manage them. These specialized skills can be expensive and difficult for businesses to find experts and recruit them. 

To get the most out of newly containerized workloads, businesses need to adopt DevOps. Without continuous integration and continuous delivery/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline streamlining and automating the transfer of new code from development to production, it’s difficult or even impossible to realize the business benefits of cloud-based containerized workloads. 

Partnering with a Kubernetes and container expert

Owing to the complexities of managing Kubernetes and containers, many organizations are turning to skilled partners for help. The right partner can provide the full range of experienced services — including proven methodologies and toolsets, migration and modernization skills, security skills and support services.

By leveraging the expertise of a seasoned Kubernetes and container team, organizations can optimize the full benefits of the cloud, including: 

• Faster time-to-market  
• Greater application portability  
• Increased application development productivity 
• Lower operating costs  
• Expanded flexibility and agility  
• Improved infrastructure operation

Leveraging the Rackspace Technology solution

To address your Kubernetes and container needs, Rackspace Technology® created a container enablement solution: Rackspace Managed Platform for Kubernetes powered by Platform9’s Managed Kubernetes. This solution provides organizations with the tools, roadmap, managed services and access to engineers they need to introduce, orchestrate and manage containers across their managed cloud, multicloud or hybrid cloud environment. Our architects and engineers can design, build, manage and optimize container solutions running on private or public clouds using Kubernetes distributions, including Platform9, Rancher, ECS, EKS, GKE and AKS. To support the implementation and management of the services, we can equip organizations with a dedicated and flexible team of engineers through Rackspace Elastic Engineering for Multicloud Kubernetes.

Rackspace Managed Platform for Kubernetes solves a wide range of common challenges by providing:

• A single platform for deploying and managing workloads across private and public cloud
• A curated platform experience for containerized workloads and applications
• A support team comprised of certified Kubernetes experts

Organizations that want to take full advantage of the cloud should consider how they plan to leverage containerized workloads and the orchestration platforms they depend on.