Containers that run the same everywhere

Your application runs fine on the developer's laptop, almost on the test server, and slightly differently again in production. So every deployment is an evening of work with someone watching, preferably at a time when nobody else is working. When a new colleague starts, it takes a day before the environment on their machine does the same as everyone else's. Containers solve exactly that: the recipe for the environment belongs with the code and travels with it.

Why containers bring calm

A container is nothing magical. It is your application plus everything it needs, packed in a package that starts the same way everywhere: the same version of the language, the same libraries, the same settings. If it runs with us, it runs with you, and the other way around. That sounds small, but it removes the biggest source of outages: the difference between two machines that nobody can explain anymore.

You only notice the second advantage after six months. Because the environment sits in a file that lives in your own repository, it can be read, changed, and rolled back. A server that has been hand-tweaked for three years, nobody can rebuild. A container you rebuild from the recipe, even if the machine underneath drops out or moves to another data center.

When Kubernetes is worth it and when it is not

Kubernetes is a tool for when several machines have to work together: distributing containers, restarting one when it falls over, and growing along when it gets busy. For an organization with a handful of applications that is often heavier than needed. Two or three containers on a well-configured VPS hosting do the same work, with far fewer parts that can break.

It does pay off once several teams want to deploy independently of each other, or when the load differs a lot from day to day and you do not want to pay for the peak permanently. And if the failure of a single machine really must not mean the service stands still, that conversation belongs with High availability and failover rather than with a cluster as such. We tell you right away if the simple variant is enough.

Deploy without stress

Within 10 business days we build a test environment that is put together in exactly the same way as production: the same recipe, different data. There you calmly practice a deployment once, including rolling it back, before it really counts. What works there will also work on the environment your customers use.

A deployment thereby becomes a matter of minutes. The new version starts next to the old one, the traffic switches over as soon as it reports healthy, and the old one stays up a little longer just in case. Back is the same action in reverse order. The database does not go along in that, because we put it next to it, so a rollback never takes your data with it.

What we manage and what stays yours

We manage the machines underneath, the updates of the cluster, the monitoring, and the backups. That monitoring runs continuously and it is recorded who gets called when: monitoring by systems with an agreed escalation. The machines sit in our managed environments, so your data stays within the EU.

What stays yours are the container files, the configuration, the images, and the data. Everything sits in your own repository and in a registry you can access, so leaving is always possible: you take the recipe with you and someone else starts it elsewhere. We record the restore together with Backup and disaster recovery, and periodically we try whether such a restore really works in practice. You are the owner; we are the party that keeps it running.