Containerisation involves packaging software that contains all the necessary elements to run an operating system virtually. This allows organisations to run operating systems from anywhere - in a private datacentre, public cloud or even a personal laptop.
Containers make it easy to share CPU, memory, storage, and network resources in an operating system for logical packaging with other applications so that they can be easily abstracted from the environment they run in.
What are the Benefits of Containerisation?
Fewer system resources - Containers require less overhead than traditional machines or virtual environments.
Use only what you use - Use only the containers you need and add more when needed.
Smooth operation - The operations of containers are the same, no matter when or where they are deployed.
Containerisation is more efficient - Containers can be deployed, patched and scaled when needed.
Better production cycles - Containerisation can accelerate development through better testing and production cycles.
Containerisation Technology vs Virtualisation
While container adoption is rapidly outpacing the growth of virtual machines (VMs), containers likely won’t replace VMs outright. In general, containerisation technology drives the speed and efficiency of application development, whereas virtualisation drives the speed and efficiency of infrastructure management.
At a glance, here is a comparison of containers and VMs across several common criteria:
What is Container Orchestration?
Container orchestration involves a set of automated processes by which containers are deployed, networked, scaled, and managed. The main container orchestration platform used today is Kubernetes, which is an open-source platform that serves as the basis for many of today’s enterprise container orchestration platforms.
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available. Kubernetes provides users with:
Service discovery and load balancing
Storage orchestration
Automated rollouts and rollbacks
Automatic bin packing
Self-healing
Secret and configuration management
What is Containerisation in the Cloud?
The Kubernetes ecosystem is broad and complex and no single technology vendor offers all of the components of a complete on-prem modern applications stack. Beginning with the innovative approach to infrastructure that Nutanix pioneered with hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and AOS, Nutanix has several core competencies that are both rare and difficult to replicate that offer differentiated value to customers.
Nutanix’s primary technology strengths for building on-prem Kubernetes environments include:
Distributed systems management capabilities
Integrated storage solutions covering the three major classes: Files, Volumes, and Objects storage
Nutanix Kubernetes Engine - Fully-Integrated Kubernetes management solution with native Kubernetes user experience
We believe Nutanix hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) is the ideal infrastructure foundation for containerized workloads running on Kubernetes at scale. Nutanix provides platform mobility giving you the choice to run workloads on both your Nutanix private cloud as well as the public cloud. The Nutanix architecture was designed keeping hardware failures in mind, which offers better resilience for both Kubernetes platform components and application data. With the addition of each HCI node, you benefit from the scalability and resilience provided to the Kubernetes compute nodes. Equally important, there is an additional storage controller that deploys with each HCI node which results in better storage performance for your stateful containerized applications.
The Nutanix Cloud Platform provides a built-in turnkey Kubernetes experience with Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE). NKE is an enterprise-grade offering that simplifies the provisioning and lifecycle management of multiple clusters. Nutanix is about customer choice, customers can run their preferred distribution such as Red Hat OpenShift, Rancher, Google Cloud Anthos, Microsoft Azure, and others, due to the superior full-stack resource management.
Nutanix Unified Storage provides persistent and scalable software-defined storage to the Kubernetes clusters. These include block and file storage via the Nutanix CSI driver as well as S3-compatible object storage. Furthermore, with Nutanix Database Service, you can provision and operate databases at scale.
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