Containerization - new shared hosting
New virtualization and containerization solutions are being used by developers to test applications and support the development infrastructure. But will this be the new shared hosting format?
As a solution, the opportunity arises to take advantage of containerization. At the moment, the technology is ready for industrial use:
Containers as a basis for shared hosting are beneficial for the hosters themselves. It can be served both as a traditional hosting and as a cloud, PaaS, SaaS, and so on, depending on what is at the top of the news. For example, today it is Docker, which is actively developed by the community.
Using containers that are the same on the user's machine and on the hosting reduces the chain from the decision to create a website to directly launching the application on the hosting and simplifies the deployment and transfer of the application to a new hosting. To deploy a site or application, it is enough to provide a text file describing the container and enter the credit card information. This is definitely easier than uploading files via FTP.
The user is tied to the company, because it is technically possible to provide scaling to a greater extent than before. To temporarily resolve performance issues, simply transfer the container to a less busy node. Thanks to CRIU, in most cases this will happen transparently to the user.
There is an opportunity to reduce the number of cars. Containers can be added both to idle servers, and to those working with incomplete loading. There is an opportunity to quickly put into operation and decommission physical servers. There is an opportunity to utilize unused computing resources by other applications that are not related to shared hosting.
And finally, the question for the habrasociety is whether a more technological platform is really the deciding factor in choosing a hosting, or is support and marketing deciding everything?
What I see today in shared hosting
- Customers Want Less Technical Details and Store Everything in the Cloud
- Compared to what it was five years ago, you need less magical actions in the unix shell to launch your application (panels, containers, simple installers appeared)
- There are many SaaS and PaaS applications that perform all the same functions as self-hosted applications
As a solution, the opportunity arises to take advantage of containerization. At the moment, the technology is ready for industrial use:
- Maas / juju - Ubuntu stack, allows you to manage many geographically distributed physical servers and run applications from ready-made templates.
- Proprietary Clouds: Red Hat (OpenShift), VMWare (Cloud Foundry), Google (App Engine)
- Modern solutions for shared hosting (CloudLinux with isolated environments)
- Docker: solves the problem of delivering an application from a client to a hosting platform and generally changes the paradigm from “client / site” to “client / application”, which brings hosting closer to the business. Docker allows you to use LXC containers. CRIU (OpenVZ / Parallels) allows you to transfer LXC containers between physical machines transparently to the user
What do we get as a result?
Containers as a basis for shared hosting are beneficial for the hosters themselves. It can be served both as a traditional hosting and as a cloud, PaaS, SaaS, and so on, depending on what is at the top of the news. For example, today it is Docker, which is actively developed by the community.
Using containers that are the same on the user's machine and on the hosting reduces the chain from the decision to create a website to directly launching the application on the hosting and simplifies the deployment and transfer of the application to a new hosting. To deploy a site or application, it is enough to provide a text file describing the container and enter the credit card information. This is definitely easier than uploading files via FTP.
The user is tied to the company, because it is technically possible to provide scaling to a greater extent than before. To temporarily resolve performance issues, simply transfer the container to a less busy node. Thanks to CRIU, in most cases this will happen transparently to the user.
There is an opportunity to reduce the number of cars. Containers can be added both to idle servers, and to those working with incomplete loading. There is an opportunity to quickly put into operation and decommission physical servers. There is an opportunity to utilize unused computing resources by other applications that are not related to shared hosting.
And finally, the question for the habrasociety is whether a more technological platform is really the deciding factor in choosing a hosting, or is support and marketing deciding everything?