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What is Container Management: Short meaningful FAQs for everyone

What is Container Management: Short meaningful FAQs for everyone

5
min read
Olha Diachuk
November 24, 2024

We know that fewer companies don’t use pods or clusters today than those using them for a while. And they do that quite effectively, according to the latest K8s Benchmark Report done by Fairwinds, but lots of quite disturbing details still appear:

  • Rightsizing containers is challenging for more than 37% of containerized applications’ owners. This issue leads to excessive resource costs.
  • Liveness and readiness probes are poor for more than 55% of organizations, lacking ready replicas for replacing disconnected infrastructure components. 
  • Security is a pain, we know, for 28% of projects especially. They have more than 90% of workloads running under insecure conditions.

So when we see these points, we have to get back to basics and find what can improve these three points. We invite you to join us and dig in new treasures from container management solutions.

What is a container? And why it’s so hard to rightsize it?

A container is the smallest “Lego” part for modern cloud-native development. It is a separate computing environment that includes the components of an app and all its dependencies, enabling the application to run in any environment with the same success. 

By isolating software in pods and clusters, development teams can do their job with apps, experiencing faster and more efficient testing and development cycles. This makes them integral to modern containers’ management and smuggle boundaries across devs, test, and prod environments. So easy and handy, but what’s wrong with it?

The time goes by, your project grows, and everything will become deprecated. The container manager has to take care of changes that appear with the project and updates for the whole ecosystem. Failing any of these points out of sight leads to multiple problems. 

One of the aspects of growth is understanding how many resources your project needs. This is why rightsizing remains a challenge in container management Kubernetes environments. It requires accurately estimating the exact CPU and memory resources needed to avoid over-allocation (wasting precious resources) or under-allocation (risking app failure). 

Another name for over-allocation is over-provisioning
A significant reason rightsizing is challenging is that app workloads and traffic vary dynamically, especially in complex microservices architectures. 

Moreover, container management platform may support instruments that automate scaling, but they still rely on accurate resource requests and limits. Setting conservative rules for resource allocations can result in frequent scaling or even service outages, while excessive allocations lead to unused resources and higher costs​.

Why do containers need management?

The short answer is they need wise guidance to grow, scale, and update the environments and operating systems. Those problems are completely curable and in the hands of experts in container management software. There are two main ways to do that:

  • Manually. And to a certain extent, it’s one of the most efficient ways to manage your containerized app. However, as complexity grows as mushrooms after the rain, experts may reach the cellar of the personal efficiency level, and the only thing to do is to start automation. 
  • Automatically. For those who believe that it works like this—one day you have the DevOps doing all the load balancing and stuff, and then another—you get a fine robot doing the same but better for you, no, you’re not quite right. Container management platforms also require a specialist to handle the automation setup for you. And then, the automation you’ve set, like a bundle of rules and algorithms, will require updating as well. 

So there’s no chance to get rid of DevOps’es, ahaha, right? No matter what way you choose, there’s the possibility to manage containers correctly and with maximum efficiency. 

What is container management? How to make your infrastructure reliable and secure

This type of management involves overseeing the infrastructure deployment, scaling, monitoring, and security issues. 

Managing container environments becomes particularly complex, especially if you have a project with hundreds or thousands of components across distributed environments. What typically should you as an infrastructure manager do?

  1. Maintaining efficient resource allocation by knowing your load patterns, and traffic trends, and using best-fit autoscaling tools;
  2. Optimizing app performance by monitoring the project health data and searching rooms for improvement;
  3. Ensuring security with failure recovery and consistent updating of a containerized ecosystem.

To handle these tasks, you’ll need a gun, no, we’re kidding, a full toolbox of services and solutions, and a gun 🙂. Container management tools like Kubernetes offer solutions for container cluster management that can handle even thousands of components. These so-called orchestrators simplify lifecycle management, especially as clusters grow and demand constant attention as toddlers at a mall, sorry, as they demand seamless technical coordination. 

We’ll talk more about the selection of a container management tool later, stay tuned! 

Benefits of container management that influence your project resilience

Those problems we’ve mentioned in the introduction are also results of the lack of data culture and nurturing inside of the team. So there are some benefits to mention when it comes to good behavior with your infrastructure.

If your infrastructure administrating works as a clock, congrats, you’ve (most likely) bridged technical knowledge gaps across teams! Tools like Portainer simplify managing containerized applications, allowing less technically experienced team members to use features otherwise requiring extensive DevOps knowledge. 

This ease of use translates to faster onboarding, greater team collaboration, and minimized errors—especially beneficial for smaller teams without dedicated DevOps experts​.


Another benefit is accelerated compliance and audit readiness. As regulations around data privacy and security increase, companies use container management system software to automatically entitle compliance policies across all components.

Strongly regulated industries, striving for compliance

For teams operating in regulated industries, this feature of container management services helps ensure adherence to standards with minimal added complexity.

Lastly, improved resource efficiency through dynamic resource allocation is a key benefit of using managed containers. By employing accurate orchestration strategies, a container management system can meet your expectations regarding latency and availability by monitoring workloads and scaling resources in real-time. 

Dynamic scaling by PredictKube. Find out more details in our PancakeSwap case study

This dynamic scaling reduces costs and energy consumption by only using resources as needed, a significant advantage for cost control and sustainability goals.

What is a container platform? Isn’t it only Kubernetes?

This platform integrates key tools and technologies such as infrastructure engines (e.g., Docker) for building and running pods and clusters, orchestrators (e.g., Kubernetes) for automating deployment and scaling, and other tools—for monitoring. It typically includes a container management service that handles the underlying infrastructure and security, automates updates, and integrates monitoring and logging tools for comprehensive observability across distributed environments. So this is a must-have for the automation approach. 

Using container management systems to streamline managing containers across a complex network, these platforms are essential in large-scale, cloud-native, and microservices architectures. For instance, Docker Desktop and Red Hat OpenShift are examples of platforms that support all infrastructure components’ lifecycle management while ensuring compatibility with additional management tools for security, compliance, and scaling operations in prod.

What are container tools?

These tools are specialized solutions that simplify coping with pods and clusters in enterprise settings. These tools support functions across Kubernetes container management, VMware container integration, monitoring, and security, enabling organizations to operate components at scale effectively.

Source

K8s infrastructure management is our favorite work here, at Dysnix; tens of projects got their infrastructures neatly managed and optimized thanks to our effort, and we’re proud of it! 

VMware also offers other tools designed to integrate pods and clusters with virtualized infrastructure, allowing organizations to run containerized applications alongside traditional VMs, thus enhancing flexibility in enterprise container management.

Monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana track performance, while security tools ensure that the price of breaking through the security will cost the evildoer more than protected data. 

Together, these container management tools, when applied to a container platform, form a strong base that supports infrastructure management systems, giving enterprises all they need to grow from big to the biggest.

Administrate your components, and make them shine!

So, what is container management if not playing the music? Make it your favorite song, be aware of changes in the melody, and care about your musical instruments—and you’ll get more of it.

There’s always a space to grow and improve, even if you’re a guru of container management. So we’ll be glad if you share your stories and challenges with our distilled community of CTO and Web2/Web3 enthusiasts interested in fine-tuned infrastructure and solving riddles around it—join us today!

Olha Diachuk
Writer at Dysnix
10+ years in tech writing. Trained researcher and tech enthusiast.
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