Containers have become the building blocks of IT modernizations. This includes cloud migrations, application deployments, Kubernetes clusters, and CI/CD pipelines. Stratacent can support our customers along this journey and provide the means to maximize our customers’ return on investment.
Why Containers?
Containers enable our customers to quickly scale as they will leverage all the computing power along with all the memory. Containers are extremely portable due to their small size. We can quickly move a container between various instance sizes and have the entire application ready to go in seconds. Containers can start in a matter of seconds even using applications that typically take minutes to hours to start. Versioning is straightforward with containers. You can quickly freeze a container in time with minimal overhead and storage.
Container as a Service
Stratacent provide an automated container service once your infrastructure is set up. We can leverage public cloud services like Azure Kubernetes Service, either within your tenant or another tenant of choosing. This would provide full-stack operational support of your on-premise container requirements as well as in the public clouds.
What is Container Factory?
Container Factory refers to Stratacent’s ability to provide a customized service to our customers that includes building containers, container recipes, orchestration of containers, and running containers in various public clouds including on-premise private clouds. Building containers and container recipes are the proven best practices around creating an application or deploying an application within a container.
Stratacent can help with creating container recipes, docker files for home-grown applications such as Java-based applications, or we can take a third-party vendor application and break it apart for deployment using containers. We work with vendors such as SAS for deployment. For example, we have best practices around building a self-contained SAS Viya 3.5 container for programming only analytic containers (POAC). This approach enhances the portability of the container and allows for faster deployment of the container in a more ephemeral environment particularly with CI/CD model development pipelines.
The CI/CD model development pipeline is an excellent example of how Stratacent can help with the orchestration of containers, even within Kubernetes cluster or Kubernetes deployments, as well as simple best practices concerning running containers in Azure, AWS, GCP, or simply on a docker host on a Linux server in your datacenter. We can help you customize your solution to leverage a single container that multiple tenants leverage versus a single tenant per container.