We have talked a lot about the value proposition for EPYC™ processors in virtualized environments, including a potential TCO savings of up to 45% in scenarios where AMD estimates competitive dual-socket system costs against the costs of a single EPYC processor-based system. The scalability AMD EPYC delivers to containerized applications and services using the Docker platform has received less attention.
Containers are a natural evolution of virtualization when it comes to increasing server efficiency even further. Separating the OS from the application removes the requirement to run a copy of the entire OS with each application on a virtualized machine, allowing many more applications to run on a single VM . Containers allow developers to package up an application and its parts, such as libraries and other dependencies, and deliver it as a single package.
With the Docker platform, businesses have been able to modernize monolithic or traditional applications and transition them to a container-based solution. Most business applications consist of several components organized into a stack: web server, database, and in-memory cache. Containers make it possible to compose each component into separate functional units or packages that can be maintained, scaled and updated independently. The Docker platform is a key technology for enabling this type of application design, often called a microservice model where each such functional component is a microservice.
AMD EPYC provides increased core density and flexibility to scale Docker-based microservices and applications up or down to meet spikes in demand or conserve system resources. CPU response time increases linearly when all cores become saturated and the number of concurrently running containers continue to ramp up. For CPU-intensive workloads, EPYC capabilities enable system administrators to calculate how much CPU to over-provision depending on their applications Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
The Docker platform is available as both an open-source platform and enterprise-ready container platform for packaging, distributing, and managing applications within containers.
To learn more about the scalable performance of AMD EPYC in a Docker environment, please see three in-depth examples here.
Raghu Nambiar is the CVP & CTO of Datacenter Ecosystems & Application Engineering at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied. GD-5