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Run your cloud-native apps faster and more cost effectively!

By Joe Cropper posted Wed August 10, 2022 02:58 PM

  

With technology being front and center in every organization’s digital transformation initiative, it is likely no surprise that developers and IT staff are in a constant search for ways to accelerate innovation that provides a competitive edge. Given this reality, what if you could take your existing cloud-native application, without changing any of the application code, and have it run even faster and more securely? To learn more, read on. 

To accelerate innovation, developers have been increasingly looking for cloud-native architectures with technologies like containers and Kubernetes. Containers are like LEGO pieces—there are millions of them (for example, on Docker Hub and Quay) and you can use them as foundational elements to build new things… applications, I mean. And the best part is, if you follow some best practices, you can run these containers anywhere!

What does this mean? Well, if they’re like me, most developers start tinkering with new technologies (like containers) on their systems, most of which are running x86-based processors. Now, while all of this is perfectly fine, that doesn’t imply that containers can only run on a single platform! In fact, the container open source community recognized this several years ago and created the notion of multi-architecture container images. That means developers can build their hello-world container once and run it on any platform—for example, on ARM, IBM Power, or x86.

Okay, so how does any of this help applications to be faster and more cost effective? Well, here’s a simple analogy – computers are like tools – there isn’t a “one size fits all” approach. Some computers are better-suited for certain tasks than others. That’s where IBM Power comes into the picture—it is a platform that has been engineered from the ground-up for compute, memory, and network-intensive operations—which is a perfect intersection for cloud-native workloads. Without getting into all the low-level hardware specifics, IBM Power10, IBM’s latest generation of the IBM Power family, has been designed to handle the most intensive cloud-native applications with the industry-leading Kubernetes platform, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. While your mileage may vary from application to application, it has been demonstrated that Power10 can achieve 4.4X better per core throughput than comparably priced competitive hardware. This means your application will run faster, occupy less physical rack space, lower your energy and carbon footprint, and ultimately achieve a much better price-performance metric.

And the best part? Developers don’t need to do anything differently to capitalize on these benefits—all you need to do is follow the “best practice” of establishing a multi-architecture continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline as part of your DevOps process, as shown below.

Multi-arch CICD Pipeline Diagram


As you can see, developers continue pushing their code to their favorite source control management system (such as GitHub) and don’t need to know anything about the underlying infrastructure. They just write their code and it gets built and deployed on whatever the most appropriate infrastructure is. For instance, developers can still run containers on their system during the development process and when IT operators need to deploy into production, they can run on IBM Power—and leverage all of those inherent benefits described above. As an example, refer to a guide on how to set up a multi-arch build pipeline using GitLab. You can replicate this type of model with several other popular CI/CD technologies such as Jenkins, and so on.

 There you have it—a streamlined way to run your cloud-native apps more efficiently, both in terms of performance and cost, by leveraging a multi-architecture infrastructure. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, I would love to hear from you! Feel free to reach out to me via email: jwcroppe@us.ibm.com!


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Tue November 28, 2023 02:39 AM

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