Introduction
Enterprises that have been running their own data centers for a number of years are skeptical of the benefits associated with cloud. One of the considerations for many enterprises is to be able to build modern applications such that the dependency on a particular cloud stack is minimal, or the interfaces that are depending on the specific cloud are abstracted well. Containers were made very easy by Docker first and now being done well in the most widely contributed open-source project right now – Kubernetes. Container adoption has slowly picked up in the year 2019. One of the main reasons is the maturing of the container orchestration platform ecosystem built mainly around Kubernetes.
Segui into Fargate
Kubernetes allows developers to adopt containers by setting deployments around Kubernetes. It allows developers to focus on applications that adhere to 12-Factor principles and let the orchestration platform provide enterprise-ready features like scalability and availability. While this is great for developers who know container and orchestration platforms, managing Kubernetes involves dealing with a lot of complexity where the developers are assuming unlimited scalability and 99.999% available assumed to be provided by Kubernetes. This coupled with a microservices architecture, makes the problem more complex from SRE(Site Reliability Engineering) perspective.
The SRE or managed services team has to deal with a lot of complexity to ensure these benefits are delivered to the applications. The second issue is that not all applications need the complexity brought by Kubernetes. To address this challenge, AWS has launched ‘low maintenance or self-managed’ orchestration technology engine called Fargate. Fargate promises scaling of application containers and underlying compute resources automatically to handle the load.
About Fargate benefits
According to AWS, Fargate is an AWS serverless compute engine for containers. What does that mean? It means you can run containers without worrying about underlying infrastructure/nodes, AWS manages that for you. You just need to specify how much resources you need to run the container. Just like AWS Lambda, where you can run a piece of code without setting up any servers. In other words, with Fargate you can focus on building your applications, it removes the headache of provisioning and managing infrastructure. The beauty of the Fargate is its pricing model. You need to pay only for the resources required to run your containers and not for the whole node/server. Security is another beauty of Fargate. Fargate runs each task (this is like pod in Kubernetes) in its own kernel. This provides each task has its own computing environment and enables your application to have workload isolation and improved security by design. Fargate can seamlessly work with existing container orchestration tools like ECS and EKS (EKS: managed Kubernetes service by AWS).
How CloudHedge helps in solving the problem
Despite these benefits of Fargate, many users are still trying to understand how to make use of it since it can be quite difficult to adopt due to the steep learning curve. CloudHedge Cruize supports Fargate deployments in an automated fashion and simplifies the entire process to deploy containerized applications on Fargate. CloudHedge makes it standardized and best practices based. And the best part, it all happens within minutes because it’s an automated process. If you would like to know more about how CloudHedge supports Fargate deployments, reach out to hello@cloudhedge.io.
