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The Pros and Cons of Using Containers for Cloud Migration Featured

The Pros and Cons of Using Containers for Cloud Migration Photo by Richard Lee on Unsplash

The cloud offers many benefits to corporations looking to streamline and reduce the cost of their IT systems. Taking advantage of the economies of scale provided by cloud providers is one of the driving forces behind the move to the cloud. There are a number of methods that can be employed when migrating an application from its current location to the cloud.

When migrating a system to the cloud you have a number of options available to you.

Migration Methods

Lift and Shift - This method involves moving part or all of an application to the cloud with minimal modifications. It is the most economical way to get started with the cloud but does not allow the application to take advantage of the full power offered by the cloud provider.

Refactoring - Modifying your application before moving it to the cloud can enable you to leverage the full power of the cloud. This method involves substantial upfront costs to successfully modify your system.

Rebuilding - Rebuilding your application from scratch is another migration method that demands extensive planning and upfront work but will allow your app to fully use the cloud’s resources.

Containers - In this migration method, only the components required to run the application are bundled in an abstract construct known as a container. This includes all of the binary code, executables, libraries, and configuration files that are needed to run the program. 

There are a number of container managers such as Microsoft Containers and Kubernetes that are designed to assist companies in migrating their IT resources. Let’s take a deeper look into the benefits and drawbacks of employing containers for cloud migration.

Here are some of the benefits of container migration.

Benefits of Container Migration

Reduced overhead - Containers are essentially a method of virtualizing an application to make it easy to deploy in various computing environments. Containers have some similarity with Virtual Machines (VMs) but are more lightweight as they do not carry around an operating system. The reduced overhead results in cost savings when apportioning cloud resources.

Portability and consistency - Containers make it easy to utilize various operating systems and hardware platforms on which to run the application. They also ensure that the program will perform consistently no matter where it resides.

Efficiency - Development efforts are streamlined with teams able to rapidly test, patch, and deploy applications.

These are some potential drawbacks to be considered before adopting a container migration strategy. 

Cons of Container Migration

Slower performance - Applications running in a container will not run as fast as those built specifically for the cloud due to the overhead required to communicate with the host system. 

Lack of skills - An IT team intent on deploying containers needs to be skilled in the container management platform they choose to adopt. Hypervisor skills are useful but are not totally applicable to designing and using containers.

Serverless computing - As the cloud environment evolves, new paradigms such as serverless computing are appearing as alternative means of taking advantage of the cloud. Serverless computing promises reduced costs and less administrative overhead when compared to containers.

Moving applications to the cloud demands an overall strategy that considers the expected benefits of moving the selected applications. Containers are one option that should be carefully reviewed when determining how you will move your IT environment to the cloud.

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 Robert Agar

I am a freelance writer who graduated from Pace University in New York with a Computer Science degree in 1992. Over the course of a long IT career I have worked for a number of large service providers in a variety of roles revolving around data storage and protection. I currently reside in northeastern Pennsylvania where I write from my home office.

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