Shorten the AWS Container Journey

When beginning the containerization process, teams must answer dozens of questions — many of which have ramifications down the road — making those decisions all that more important. Unfamiliar with the terrain, teams often find themselves in analysis paralysis as they look to educate themselves and avoid making poor design choices. A solid reference architecture can help shortcut this process by answering these questions with a design that works as a starting point for most situations.

From this need Deploy Containers for AWS was born. A ready-to-use reference architecture that speeds the deployment of containerized applications from months to as little as a week, it is the first collaborative production from NTT DATA’s December 2019 acquisition of Flux7. Based on automation and deployment best practices from hundreds of customer implementations, Deploy Containers for AWS cuts eight to ten weeks from the containerization journey by giving teams a sound foundation from which to start. Teams can customize their implementation to fit their specific needs.

Deploy Containers for AWS shrinks developer time spent on infrastructure setup and configuration and expedites the decision-making process while enabling efficient developer workflows with short feedback loops when developing application code.

Container standardization speeds business innovation
Whereas most teams wait months to move containerized applications into production, with Deploy Containers for AWS, teams have been able to promote their work from Dev to Prod from the first week of engagement. Moreover, when coupled with a Service Catalog, developers can simply input their information into the Service Catalog dashboard and deploy within minutes, allowing developers across the team — regardless of their knowledge level — to begin deploying containerized applications with standardization in minutes.

By coupling Deploy Containers for AWS and Service Catalog, the Agile Community of Practice, (CoP) or a Center of Excellence (CoE) empowers teams to deploy applications in a consistent way, scaling DevOps and cloud for greater business innovation. Developers benefit from an expedited process that allows them to consistently deliver containerized applications with quality built-in while infrastructure teams gain from a self-service model that assures standardization across builds. If the QA team is separate from the development team, they will find a testing framework plugged into the pipelines and ready to customize with automated tests. The CFO’s office will appreciate the cost controls and system optimization that can be built into the system, while saving weeks of development time building a container solution.

Migrating from traditional EC2 instances or VMs to Deploy Containers for AWS can bring significant cost savings, which in itself can justify the migration. For example, if a customer runs five applications on Windows EC2 instances it will cost $151,000 per year. After transformation, applications running on Deploy Containers for AWS will cost $21,000, a 7x cost reduction.

How does deploy containers for AWS work?
Deploy Containers for AWS is a ready-to-deploy secure foundation that expedites the deployment of both greenfield container-based applications and applications already Dockerized.

Deploy Containers for AWS Code Pipeline

The process is completely serverless and is AWS account and region agnostic. As part of the Deploy Containers for AWS implementation, customers receive AWS Container Deployment code and AWS CloudFormation code for:

Deploy Containers for AWS Infrastructure Pipeline

Using Deploy Containers for AWS, the infrastructure is deployed with a repeatable process so that updates are consistently promoted. An application pipeline is deployed to consistently build, test and promote an application from lower to higher environments, e.g. from Dev to QA to Perf and Prod.

As Deploy Containers for AWS is composed of AWS serverless components, developers can quickly see the outcome of their development efforts, quickly iterating for optimal results. Performance testing is built into the application pipeline using the artillery.io testing framework to ensure code promoted to production can scale. Deployments are made using cross-account IAM roles to allow separation of non-production and production workloads. Access to application secrets stored in AWS Secrets Manager is securely assigned to the application ECS service so that containers access their secret on a need-to-know basis.

Deploy Containers for AWS can be deployed on top of the Build Cloud Foundations solution, giving customers a fast and secure cloud foundation from which to work. Deploy Containers for AWS also complements our Transformative Migrations service, accelerating the deployment of existing applications to the public cloud for greater application agility.

In Agile environments, teams seek to create value in every Sprint. Quickly moving applications to production through ephemeral pipelines is incredibly valuable in being able to shrink the feedback loop, quickly soliciting feedback and iterating for continuous improvement. Many organizations currently take months to deploy containerized applications to production, and only then start obtaining feedback. Deploy Containers for AWS allows organizations to get a leg up by quickly honing their output for excellence.

For more information, a demonstration and an assessment of Deploy Containers for AWS, reach out to an NTT DATA representative today.