ClearScale Blog

Containers are inherently lightweight and ephemeral. Their portability and reproducibility help ensure that containerized applications run the same anywhere. For all the benefits that containers offer, however, scalability can be an operational challenge. Containers are typically used for microservices, with each service running in its own container. It’s not unusual for a single containerized app to require managing hundreds or even thousands of containers. It’s one thing to manage the deployment and maintenance of 10 containers. There’s

By Alexandr Ivenin, System Technical Lead, ClearScale Whether you’re developing cloud-native applications or modernizing existing apps, it’s good to have choices ─ particularly in terms of technologies like serverless and containers. After all, cost, time to release, app scalability, complexity, use case and other factors can have a significant impact on the development process and project objectives. Some technologies are better at addressing these different issues than others. But how do you determine which approach to use? Both serverless

Container technology is considered by many in the IT industry as the go-to strategy for virtualization. Like most technologies, however, containers have security risks. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released a guide that identifies many of those risks and offers recommendations for mitigating them. While the guide doesn’t solve all the potential problems associated with containerization, it does provide a good starting point. In this post, we discuss the NIST’s take on some of the

AWS re:Invent 2020 was jam-packed with cloud insights, tips, and demonstrations. We especially enjoyed learning more about how to leverage Kubernetes and optimize infrastructure for containerized applications on AWS. Our Technical Lead from the Systems Engineering team, Alexander Ivenin, sat in on sessions that covered a wide range of Kubernetes-related topics, including how to migrate legacy applications to containers and how to operate Kubernetes clusters with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). We also learned best practices for how to

In a previous blog, we talked about how microservices have changed application modernization. A somewhat related concept that’s also had an impact is that of containers. And, as it so happens, microservices and containers work well together for app modernization. As a refresher, with microservices an app is broken down into a collection of small, loosely coupled services. Each service is continuously developed and separately maintained, and communicates through a clearly defined, lightweight framework to achieve a business objective

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is always busy introducing new services, enhancing existing ones, and, quite often, driving trends. However, the company has upped its game even more in recent months. In the first half of 2020, AWS announced an astonishing number of developments that enable technology interoperability, simplifying legacy feature removal, creating greater flexibility and time-savings for developers, and putting new capabilities at the fingertips of end-users. This is the first in a series of blogs in which we’ll

At a time when business leaders are trying to create more value with fewer resources, containers and serverless computing enable organizations to reduce IT overhead, improve deployment speed, streamline app development, and more. However, taking advantage of these technologies requires much more than simple “lift-and-shift” migrations. To achieve maximum performance, your applications must be built for the cloud. Otherwise, you risk leaving tremendous growth and cost-savings opportunities on the table. One of our Solutions Architects led a webinar recently discussing

For app development, infrastructure is usually cloud-based or server-centric. But developers do have another option — one that can help them significantly decrease their go-to-market time. It’s called serverless, and it’s what the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) considers to be the next step in cloud-native computing. Despite the name, serverless doesn’t mean that there’s no need for servers to host and run code. It simply means that developers don't have to provision them or manage infrastructure

Although they’re not restricted to running in the cloud, “containers” increasingly pop up in discussions about cloud-native application development. But before getting into the “why,” here’s a brief overview of what containers are. In simple terms, a container is a standardized package of software. Everything needed for the software to run is inside the container, including the software code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, and settings. Containers isolate apps’ execution environments from each other, but share the underlying

For all its well-documented benefits, the cloud isn’t the place for all workloads. Some don’t perform the same in the cloud as they do in on-premise environments. Others may be restricted to an on-premise data center or on-premise private cloud due to regulatory or other requirements. That was the case for a recent ClearScale customer. A sports and entertainment ticketing company, wanted to migrate from its on-premise, bare metal infrastructure to the AWS Cloud. However, data privacy and