Maximizing Efficiency: Container Challenges and Solutions

Terry Storrar

Terry Storrar, Managing Director, Leaseweb UK

As a powerful alternative to virtualisation technologies, the use of containers has grown significantly in the past decade or so as organisations have learned more about their various efficiency and agility advantages.

Further propelled by the arrival of transformative technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes, by 2023, the containers adoption curve resulted in over half (59%) of organisations using them across most or all production applications and business segments. Indeed, containers have become essential for various modern technology practices, from DevOps and microservices architectures to cloud-native development.

On the face of it, this is hardly surprising – by packaging an application and all its dependencies into a portable, self-contained unit that runs consistently, containers offer compelling cost, performance and consistency benefits.

Container challenges

However, organisations investing in container technologies must also have the appropriate in-house skills and tools to architect them correctly to meet sophisticated integration, optimisation and security requirements.

It’s not unusual, for example, for businesses to use hundreds or even thousands of containers to power their applications, and as a result, the need for specialist tools like Kubernetes has increased in line with management, scale and coordination requirements. Part of the challenge here is that while Kubernetes is a powerful and proven way to deliver on these objectives, it also requires specialist knowledge and dedicated resources across adoption, development, and maintenance processes.

If these capabilities are absent, organisations can encounter various problems, from lengthy implementation cycles to increased scope for errors. Instead of hitting efficiency objectives, some organisations end up devoting significantly more resources to their container projects than anticipated.

For those using Kubernetes, there can also be security challenges to address, with 2024 research indicating that two-thirds of organisations have delayed or slowed down deployment due to Kubernetes security concerns. Arguably, even more concerning is the finding that almost half of organisations lost revenue or customers due to a container or Kubernetes security incident.

Embracing the service model

Clearly, these are all important issues, and to get the best out of container deployment strategies, many organisations are turning to specialist service providers in the form of cloud-based orchestration services that integrate the expertise and resources required to optimise infrastructure for containerised workloads.

For example, the MSP model promotes ease of implementation because organisations outsource the entire process. This means they can focus their efforts on deriving value from their applications instead of allocating resources to administration, maintenance and performance needs. For example, developers can easily create multiple clusters in a single data centre location, offering highly flexible functionality and the ability to separate applications as required for testing or production purposes.

MSPs also have the infrastructure in place to deliver the reliability and performance levels that contemporary containerised applications require. The most effective managed services also offer system monitoring and cluster health checks that are designed to identify potential issues before they can develop into more serious problems. Ongoing assessment of workloads enables continuous optimisation of computing power to meet changing demands and MSPs can also enable persistent cloud storage as many applications rely on consistent storage, like databases, message queues and content management systems. This provides significant benefits across data integrity, reliability and scalability requirements.

To address security concerns, MSPs should offer multi-layered strategies that include advanced threat protection, automated monitoring and compliance with global standards such as ISO 27001. These measures also often involve encryption, disaster recovery planning and continuous audits to ensure the integrity and resilience of containerised applications.

Then there’s the question of version management, an ongoing challenge that will be familiar to technology professionals who have worked with containers, where managing the intricacies of Kubernetes, for example, is demanding. Part of the role of an MSP is to manage update and upgrade processes, ensuring all dependencies are managed properly. This eliminates the risk of downtime that can result from poorly executed updates and the accompanying need for rollbacks, which can cause significant disruption.

Getting the most out of Kubernetes also delivers the flexibility required to manage containers at scale while also simplifying the processes required to transfer applications between different cloud providers and on-premise setups. This means organisations can adopt hybrid or multi-cloud strategies as required – an approach which can help IT teams efficiently migrate workloads as their requirements change and do so without the restriction of long-term vendor lock-in.

Bring all these capabilities together, and organisations can put themselves in an ideal position to benefit from the inherent flexibility of containers and run applications consistently across various environments, from cloud managed services to on-premise infrastructures. In doing so, IT teams can focus on application development and deployment objectives instead of devoting valuable time and resources to the underlying infrastructure.

The benefits of managing containers in the cloud

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