Container infrastructure design involves creating a robust and scalable environment to support the deployment and management of containerized applications.
Designing a container infrastructure involves considering factors such as scalability, networking, storage, security, automation, and monitoring. It’s crucial to align the infrastructure design with the specific requirements and goals of the containerized applications and to follow best practices for efficient and reliable container deployment and management.
Once we’ve assessed all our requirements, architecture, and other aspects, we can move on to container infrastructure design:
- Understand the current and future scale of operations when you make this decision. You can choose from many options based on your application’s complexity. The right questions include; how many containers do we need to run on the platform? What kind of dependencies do these containers have on each other? How frequently are we going to deploy changes to the components? What is the potential traffic the application can receive? What is the traffic pattern on the application?
- Based on the answers you get to the preceding questions, you need to understand what sort of infrastructure you will run your application on. Will it be on-premises or the cloud, and will you use a managed Kubernetes cluster or self-host and manage one? You can also look at options such as CaaS for lightweight applications.
- How will you monitor and operate your containers? Will it require installing specialist tools? Will it require integrating with the existing monitoring tool stack? Understand the feasibility and make an appropriate design decision.
- How will you secure your containers? Are there any regulatory and compliance requirements regarding security? Does the chosen solution cater to them?
Containerizing the application
Containerizing an application involves packaging the application and its dependencies into a container image, which can be deployed and run consistently across different environments.
Containerizing an application offers benefits such as improved portability, scalability, and reproducibility. It simplifies the deployment process and allows for consistent application behavior across different environments.
Once we’ve considered all aspects of the design, we can now start containerizing the application:
- This is where we look into the application and create a Dockerfile containing the steps to create the container just as it is currently. This requires a lot of brainstorming and assessment, mostly if config management tools don’t build your application by running on a virtual machine such as Ansible. It can take a long time to figure out how the application was installed, and you need to write the exact steps for this.
- If you plan to break your application into smaller parts, you may need to build your application from scratch.
- You must decide on a test suite that works on your parallel virtual machine-based application and improve it over time.
