Data Center

Why Small Businesses Should Adopt Containers for Cost and Agility

As infrastructure costs increase, small businesses may want to consider how containers can better fit their workloads.

Bill Snell is a senior hybrid infrastructure specialist at CDW. He's been in the IT business for more than 25 years and has been highly focused on discussing server, storage, virtualization, backup and recovery, and cloud-based projects. His experience allows him to discuss the technologies that are relevant to projects that can help small business customers meet current goals and future needs.

Containers were once seen as tools mainly for large enterprises, but they are becoming increasingly practical for small businesses seeking greater flexibility and efficiency. They can streamline application deployment and support modern workloads using artificial intelligence.

With improved development among container platforms and growing infrastructure cost pressures, small businesses can rely on containers for portability, supporting decisions to use resources more effectively and efficiently. If the costs of hypervisors are a concern, many containerized platforms can run a noncontainerized workload within the same host, so if virtual machines are still needed, they can be used within the same platform. That way, businesses don’t have to totally shift away from VMs.

As AI use continues to expand, SMBs should begin evaluating containerization now, including potential benefits related to cost reduction, agility and security.

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The Benefits of Containers for Small Businesses

Containers can be built and scaled quickly, giving customers more flexibility. A container boots in milliseconds versus the minutes it takes a VM. Containers typically are smaller and require fewer resources. A lean IT team will also have an easier time with backup and recovery, due to a simpler process of backing up configurations and persistent data volumes only.

Businesses thinking about their AI use may want to consolidate platforms and bring them in locally. The cost of AI in the cloud can tick upwards considerably, whereas if SMBs create a containerized platform on-premises and move in some AI workload hosts, they can do more. AI containerization on these platforms becomes much easier to maintain and orchestrate. Containers are the heart of a management orchestration layer.

That said, to take steps toward containerization, SMBs should start in the cloud. Simplified solutions such as Amazon Elastic Container Service, Amazon Web Services Fargate or Azure Kubernetes services offer SMBs a way to dabble in containers at a lower cost. For more guidance, SMBs can lean on partners, such as CDW, for a container-readiness assessment that will evaluate a business’s environment to see if it makes sense to have containers. The assessment can also determine which solutions would best fit, pinpoint additional work that needs to happen to make rollout manageable and provide a roadmap or workshops to support adoption.

Containers vs VMs: Where Virtual Machines Still Have an Edge

One consideration that favors VMs: In the event of a security issue, a business can isolate these devices thru hardware isolation. However, there are concerns with deployment sprawl because each VM needs an operating system that requires upkeep. That costs money.

A container has a single OS that can be shared with multiple containers, but it can be harder to isolate. Because multiple VMs can live on a single host, they can be manageably isolated. But containers are kept on one OS, which requires extra diligence. A container running in a VM is another way to help address security concerns.

Even with that consideration, containerized platforms have advanced with tools and processes that can address more of the isolation security that comes with VMs. While the landscape is changing, businesses may need more security savvy if they move into a containerized platform. But overall, the benefits still outweigh any additional steps related to security.

This article is part of BizTech's AgilITy blog series.