In today’s fast-paced business environment, organizations are under constant pressure to rapidly develop and deploy applications to meet evolving business needs. This necessitates the demand for scalable and efficient app management and deployment methods to ensure a seamless workflow. VM-based and Containerized deployments acquired prominence for their enhanced efficiency and security, coupled with a compact infrastructural footprint. However, over time, Containerized deployment has emerged as the preferred choice due to its lightweight nature, high portability, and ease of implementation.
Containerized deployment provides greater performance and higher resource efficiency compared to VMs. Additionally, the latter’s process is fully automated, making it a cost-effective deployment approach. According to Statista 2025, 96% of organizations prefer Containerization over VMs across all environments, including development and deployment.
Continue reading to explore how transitioning from VMs to Containerization can accelerate deployment, increase efficiency, and enhance business agility.
What is VM Based Deployment?
VM-based deployment involves hosting applications, services, or workloads on virtual machines (VMs). They are software-based emulations of physical computers that run multiple operating systems on a single piece of hardware, effectively enabling these digital computers to function on shared hardware resources. It enables businesses to optimize server use with multiple workloads consolidation in a single physical server.
However, VM-based deployment has become a traditional approach that limits scalability and portability. To match the fast-paced transformative environment, Containerization-based deployment has become the preferred solution for businesses globally.
What is Containerized-based deployment?
Containerized deployment is a method of deploying applications using Containers. They are lightweight, standalone, and portable units that encapsulate an application along with its dependencies. Containers ensure consistent application performance across different environments by packaging the code, runtime, libraries, and configurations necessary for execution.
This approach is a cornerstone of modern DevOps and cloud-native architectures, enabling rapid development, testing, and deployment of scalable and portable applications.
How it works?
- Containerization: Developers package the application, along with its dependencies and configurations, into a container image.
- Container Runtime: The image is run on a container runtime, such as Docker Engine or CRI-O.
- Orchestration: Tools like Kubernetes manage the deployment, scaling, and availability of containers within a distributed environment.
Benefits of Containerized Based Deployment:
- Portability: Applications run consistently across different environments (local, on-premises, cloud, or hybrid).
- Scalability: Containers can be scaled horizontally (adding more instances) quickly to handle varying workloads.
- Resource Efficiency: Containers share the host OS kernel, reducing resource usage compared to VMs.
- Faster Deployment: Containers start in seconds, accelerating CI/CD pipeline processes.
- Improved DevOps Practices: Simplifies automation, testing, and version control of applications.
- Resilience: Provides fault-tolerance and supports distributed architecture, facilitating the building of highly available systems.
Why Containerized-Based Deployment is Better?
Containers offer multiple advantages over traditional VMs. Unlike VMs, Containers share the kernel of the host operating system (OS). This makes them inherently lightweight, scalable, and portable. Due to its lightweight nature, it effectively accelerates app management and deployment, resulting in a more cost-effective and time-efficient approach. These benefits make containerized deployment an optimal solution for the current, dynamic business environments.
One of the main challenges of VM is performance overhead, caused by the additional hypervisor layer between the VMs and the hardware. It leads to increased resource usage, performance issues, and higher costs. For instance, in the case of traffic fluctuations, VMs take considerable time to enhance app performance scalability. Update deployment and resource scaling would be difficult. Containerization can easily solve this business problem. Technologies like Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform streamline scaling with automation, enabling prompt adjustments. Moreover, the shared kernel enables containers to enhance resource utility effectively, improving efficiency.
In contrast to VM’s complex management, container-based deployment streamlines the entire management via orchestration. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RHOCP), for example, provides an extensive orchestration solution that automates the entire application life-cycle management, ensuring smoother and hassle-free operations.
Summing it up, for businesses, containerized deployment means:
- Innovation at Scale: Containerized applications automation simplifies scaling and deployment, enabling businesses to roll out new features and changes as per customer needs or market demand. The accelerated time-to-market enhances companies’ agility, providing a significant competitive edge.
- Cost Savings and Operational Efficiency: Efficient resource utilization is a key benefit of Containerization, as its lightweight infrastructure reduces costs and minimizes wastage. Automation frees up IT teams to focus on new initiatives and innovations at scale.
- Better Scalability: Containerization allows businesses to scale seamlessly based on demand, optimizing resource usage, and ensuring peak performance. This approach minimizes the risk of application slowdowns or crashes, making containerized deployments highly reliable.
A Quick Look at VM-Based Deployment v/s Container-Based Deployment:
| Aspect | VM-Based Deployment | Container-Based Deployment |
|---|---|---|
| Weight | Heavy (includes full OS) | Lightweight |
| Startup Time | Slow (minutes) | Fast (seconds) |
| Isolation | Strong OS-level isolation | Process-level isolation |
| Resource Usage | High | Efficient |
| Scalability | Limited | High |
| Portability | Limited | High |
| Management | Complex | Simplified (via orchestration) |
| Cost | Expensive | Cost-effective |
| Deployment | Manual/limited automation | Fully automated |
Applications Deployment Easy with Containerization and Evoke
While Container-based deployment has its share of challenges, a well-executed implementation roadmap can transform it into a robust and effective development and deployment solution. Orchestration platforms such as RedHat OpenShift offer advanced service intelligence that streamlines the enterprise cloud complexities, empowering developers to pace up digital transformation. Its seamless integration of varied trusted and tested services ensures smooth application development, deployment, running, modernization, and management, driving operational excellence and innovation.
Consider a scenario: A healthcare organization needs a responsive and effective telehealth application capable of managing patient demand while ensuring secure, seamless communication for healthcare providers. Container-based deployment can effectively scale the telehealth app as per demand in real time. It ensures smooth telecommunication with failover mechanisms automation. Additionally, the built-in security attributes guarantee patient data protection. The healthcare organization is thus able to fulfill the varying needs of patients, ensuring a seamless telecommunication experience.
Containerized Platforms offers a wide range of tools to enhance and accelerate app development and deployment at scale. This empowers businesses to deploy applications irrespective of the industry domains.
Recently, Evoke assisted a client in migrating their Pega Application from a VM-based deployment to a container-based deployment using the Red Hat OpenShift Container platform. This helped the client to enhance resource management, improve server quality, and reduce server maintenance costs by 65%, empowering them to be future-ready for Pega Upgrades alongside.
Pega’s low-code app development features, combined with the containerized platform’s CI/CD capabilities, significantly expedite app development and deployment. This allows businesses to roll out new features faster, aligning with evolving market and customer demands.
However, understanding and implementing the right set of tools is critical to successful application deployment. Wrong combination of tools can introduce complications, leading to unnecessary bottlenecks, delays, and increased expenses. Evoke’s team of Pega experts can help you in this regard. Equipped with years of experience and knowledge, our Pega experts provide advanced solutions, software development roadmap, and end-to-end assistance.
Conclusion
To conclude, considering today’s rapidly evolving market, businesses must embrace an agile approach that ensures seamless scalability and operational efficiency. Evoke’s advanced deployment solutions empower you to achieve these goals while gaining a competitive edge. Our team of Pega experts combines industry best practices, deep technical expertise, and customized containerized deployment strategies to deliver robust, high performing solutions that drive efficiency and innovation.
Connect with our Pega experts to explore how we can help your business optimize deployment, accelerate transformation, and maximize ROI. Let’s collaborate on tailored solutions that propel your business to new heights of growth and success.
