Automation: The Future of Modern Container Management for Hybrid IT

Companies in every industry are diving into automation as a major way to increase productivity and be more competitive. This is especially true for tech companies; the tech companies that don’t automate will quickly be left behind. 

If your legacy systems are causing you too much slow manual work, here’s how to take advantage of automation to make your container management systems more accurate, efficient and secure.

Why Container Management Systems Are Essential

As companies automate more, they frequently rely on containers to run applications quickly. The challenge is to create a hybrid cloud platform to manage software delivery on containers, which enables enterprises to deliver products to customers faster and more efficiently. 

Some common processes that container management systems handle include conducting health checks, monitoring environments for failed or struggling containers, orchestrating lifecycles of containerized applications, creating and deploying new containers and scaling application containers. 

Many companies invest in container management systems to avoid the tedious difficulty of manually managing cloud native workloads. Due to the complexity, scale and dynamic nature of containerized applications, manual management is likely to introduce errors. The sheer number of containers can be overwhelming to manage, and it’s even harder to ensure consistent security, compliance and access controls across distributed systems.

Why Automation Is Vital for Container Management

As organizations and their applications get more complex, so do their containers. In enterprise environments, containerizing is increasingly complicated, especially in multi-cloud and hybrid environments. 

Automation is now essential for container management and orchestration at scale, which is why we created Rancher Fleet. Rancher Fleet is a solution to automate Kubernetes clusters and help orchestrate container management. When you implement solutions like Rancher Fleet, you gain some of the key benefits of automation in containerization, such as: 

• Efficiency: Automation streamlines repetitive tasks, such as scaling and deployments, for rapid efficiency gains. 
• Accuracy: When containerization is automated, companies see error reduction. The automation eliminates human errors and ensures consistent configurations across environments. 
• Resource optimization: Containerization helps you get the most bang for your buck by dynamically allocating resources based on workload demand. As a bonus, resource optimization capabilities help you recover faster if one of your containers experiences downtime. 
• Improved security: Automating vulnerability scanning and compliance checks across containers is essential for keeping your data safe, especially in distributed and multi-vendor environments that have increased security risks.
• Consistency: Using a container management system helps maintain consistent container images, application versions and configurations across environments, which keeps your company compliant too.

Real-World Use Cases for Cloud Native Automation

Automation is now an essential element of modern container management systems. Here are some real-world use cases where automation can significantly enhance management of cloud native workloads. 

DevOps integration

Automation is a game-changer for DevOps integration. Developers can use automation in many places in their CI/CD pipeline, such as automating builds whenever code is committed, automatically moving applications from staging to production and automating testing to prevent regressions. 

Hybrid cloud orchestration

When managing applications across multiple cloud environments or hybrid environments, containerization automation will become your best friend. Automation can help you manage applications across multiple cloud environments by scaling workloads, aggregating metrics from all environments into a unified dashboard and automating VPN and hybrid connectivity solutions to ensure secure communication between on-premises and cloud workloads.

Disaster recovery

Have a disaster recovery plan in place in case the worst happens. By implementing automated backups, failovers and recovery processes, you can minimize downtime and data loss if something bad happens. You can stay prepared with SUSE’s SLSA compliance certification, SUSE Storage and SUSE Security products and our premium support.

Future Trends in Automation

AI and machine learning are constantly opening vast possibilities for automated container management. As AI/ML make automation faster and more common, companies can take advantage of accelerated and more accurate automation to increase their operational efficiency.

 For example, companies can use AI’s predictive analytics to estimate when traffic will wax and wane. Using this capability, companies can use predictive scaling for better resource management and lower costs. Advanced analytics can also shape smarter container orchestration for better load optimization, anomaly detection and security monitoring. 

Another future trend in container automation is predictive maintenance and health monitoring. Failed containers can be costly and can place increased loads on other containers. However, with AI’s predictive analytics, companies can anticipate when a container will need maintenance and automatically trigger repairs if a container shows signs of struggling.

How SUSE Brings Container Management Automation to the Enterprise Level

Companies are starting to embrace the transformative role of automation in container management systems. By adding the powerful automation capabilities to their container management system, companies benefit from fewer errors, better resource management, improved security and more. 

When enterprises adopt automation as part of their container management processes, they’re aligning with larger company goals of scalability, security and operational efficiency. To see how efficient your containerization could be, learn more about SUSE Rancher Prime’s automation capabilities for container management.