Every business is clamoring to save money. For some companies, cutting back the budget is the only way to stay afloat. And with the economy showing no signs of improving, it has become more critical that businesses cannot only function but flourish…even when suffering under the constraints of an ever-tightening budget.
But it's more than just about money. Or at least not directly. As the adage goes, "time is money." Everyone in IT understands this. Whether rolling out a new piece of software, deploying updates, or beginning the development process for a full-stack application, time can be a friend or an enemy to your budget. And if there's one piece of technology under the pressure of time and money, it's containers. When adopting containerization, if its done right it can save you money. However poorly designed container solutions and application deployments have the opposite effect. Whether it's a poorly crafted manifest or simply getting your teams up to speed on Kubernetes, those efforts can directly and profoundly impact the bottom line.
Ask anyone who understands Kubernetes, and they will agree with various stories, anecdotes, and opinions.
When it comes to containers, many businesses wind up in a love-hate relationship with them. The massive benefits of using containers, including money and time savings, scalability, failover, high availability, and portability, are clearly articulated and marketed. Still, when it comes to the implementation, they quickly realize that it's not all unicorns and rainbows. Getting started has a steep learning curve, and doing it properly takes dedication from developers, admins, and DevOps teams.
The truth is, it's relatively easy to stand up a Kubernetes cluster, especially with Minikube, Microk8s, and Public Cloud managed Kubernetes services like AKS, EKS, and GKE. Once you get beyond the initial stages, the complexity and decision-making process ultimately begins. Deploying a Kubernetes cluster on AWS takes only a few minutes. That's where the simplicity ends, and the complexity can become quite daunting.
After those first few minutes, time starts to drag. Developers must learn the ins and outs of every moving piece required to deploy a successful, cost-saving application or service to the Kubernetes cluster. This can take days, weeks, or even months to get right. This slowdown is costly. As mentioned above, budgets are shrinking, but complexity is increasing. These two contradict one another. And even though you have absolute faith in your team, if containers and application delivery remain at a standstill, you begin to lose. With each day passing, your competition is gaining ground or, worse… leaping ahead.
At this point, time and money are not on your side.
A container management platform is crucial to businesses looking to hop onto the container bandwagon without spending nearly as much time and money to make it happen. Let's compare it to a technology that's existed for a long time. Databases. With database administration, you have two routes: the command line or a user-friendly GUI. Although you might have database administrators that are perfectly at home running very complicated SQL queries, to run them strictly from the command line is time-consuming. While admins have the necessary skill, sometimes efficiency must take precedence. To that end, several outstanding web or client-based GUI tools make administering databases exponentially more efficient. So, instead of looking at it as making things easy, it's more about making everything work more smoothly and quickly. Empowering your teams to point and click to deploy a complex database will save considerable time. And, as we all know, saving time equals saving money…especially when the time-saving method is just as reliable (if not more so) than the old-fashioned CLI method.
The same holds for containers, which is why applications like Portainer were created. Portainer isn't about limiting the technology; it's about making it more efficient to work with. It's about empowering your teams with the tools to help them work faster and more reliably. With such tools at their disposal, the ramp-up time to full container functionality is cut dramatically. As a result, once the cluster is up and running, there will be far less lag before that first app or service deployment is ready. Time aligns with money, which equates to savings. Solutions and platforms like Portainer are meant to allow your developers, admins, and DevOps teams to run while they're learning to walk.
In the end, Portainer isn't about just simplifying technology. Portainer provides a clear and concise path to leveraging the powerful technology of containers and the teams that develop, support, and manage modern applications. With such tools, you are given the ability to save time and money without sacrificing anything technologically.
What business doesn't want that!
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