Optimizing Container Environments for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure Cloud Users to Meet Agility Needs and Risk Tolerance
Virtana, a leading provider of AI-driven solutions for hybrid cloud management and monitoring, announces a new Kubernetes strategy that will deliver container support across the full portfolio of Virtana Platform solutions. This strategy will deliver actionable infrastructure insights for optimal performance, cost, and capacity of business applications.
The first deliverable of this strategy is a rightsizing feature for container environments through Virtana Platform’s cloud cost optimization solution. With this capability, Virtana Platform users will have access to container rightsizing recommendations alongside ones for traditional compute — all within the Costs Savings Opportunities dashboard of Virtana Platform.
Enterprises are increasingly adopting Kubernetes to accelerate software development, scale deployment, and enable faster digital transformation. Gartner® estimates1 that by 2026 more than 90% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production (an increase from fewer than 40% in 2020). IDC reports2 that 80% of new workloads are being developed in containers.
Given this rapid spike in Kubernetes usage, AWS and Azure users need a tool that provides cost savings for both traditional compute and containerized/serverless compute resources. As of today, most users do not appropriately constrain, monitor, or manage their Kubernetes containers, leading to excess spend and unpredictable performance.
“There is a huge opportunity to unlock development speed, flexibility, and operational efficiency through container usage,” said Jon Cyr, Head of Product for Virtana. “Yet many enterprises leveraging containers forget the basics of rightsizing and monitoring before and during development, leading to huge end of month bills and unnecessary cloud spend.”
Jon continued: “Virtana’s strategy is to address the challenges that arise through a customer’s cloud native journey. We offer the unique ability to trace the entire data path from container to compute, network, and storage.”
Virtana collects performance metrics from customers’ container environments through the use of Prometheus, the leading open source monitoring tool for Kubernetes. Through Virtana Platform, the company then analyzes the metrics to provide insight and deliver prescriptive rightsizing recommendations for Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Microsoft’s Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) containers. From these recommendations, users can tailor the default rightsizing based on constraints for CPU and memory, to meet specific business requirements and risk tolerance. Key benefits of Virtana’s cloud cost optimization Kubernetes feature:
- Rightsizes traditional compute and containers across multiple clouds in one tool
- Tune sizing based on organization’s risk tolerance with what-if analysis that includes CPU and memory
- Automatically optimize instances with rightsizing recommendations
- Adjust to real-time changes in cloud service provider offerings to optimize cost structures
- Analyzes performance metrics using open source collection
“Containers and Kubernetes are becoming popular technologies for cloud-native applications and have significantly grown in adoption during the past five years. Gartner estimates that more than one-third of enterprises are running containerized workloads in production and nearly 10% of total workloads run on containers today. Despite the apparent progress, the container ecosystem continues to be chaotic, fast paced and fragmented,” said Arun Chandrasekaran and Wataru Katsurashima of Gartner in The Innovation Leader’s Guide to Navigating the Cloud-Native Container Ecosystem.
This new Kubernetes optimization feature will be available for all Virtana Platform customers with a Pro license, with additional configuration.
Companies can try Virtana Platform’s cloud cost management and optimization for free atvirtana.com/optimize-free-tier. Free trial accounts are able to access this Kubernetes feature and view a limited number of recommendations.
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