10 Reasons why Dockerized Unica Products will be Your Choice

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1. Easier to install and configure

With traditional on-premise software offerings, customers have to download the installation binaries, run the installer, and perform the configuration. There are many steps in this process, and hence, typically, customers require assistance from Professional Services. With the Docker approach, you will get a set of files which can be launched with a single Helm command. It will automatically download the proper pre-installed and pre-configured Docker images, do the installation and start-up the applications. This process significantly decreases the dependency on your IT department.

​*This diagram is for the illustration of the cluster contents only. Shapes with dashed lines are failover containers, running only when the primary containers stop.

2. Built-in failover –In the configuration file, we can specify how many instances we will need to run with Kubernetes keeping watch over the whole environment. Once an instance shuts down, it will automatically start a new instance. This significantly decreases downtime and the pressure on your DevOps team.

3. Auto-scaling – Kubernetes has support for auto-scaling. All you need to do is set when to ‘scale-out’ and ‘scale in’ by setting a threshold. Kubernetes will monitor CPU utilization and dynamically add or remove running Docker containers, depending on the hardware available. If you would instead control this yourself, you can define the number of running instances in Kubernetes, and this will be maintained automatically.

4. Autoload balancing –When we start a cluster with multiple running instances for Interact run time or Campaign servers, we will have a built-in load balancer for routing the requests. Therefore, your IT team will not need to install and configure a dedicated load balancer. When new instances are added in the cluster, or running instances are removed from it, the load balancer will make the adjustment automatically.

5. Smoother upgrade –Whenever HCL has a new version of Unica platform, a new set of Docker files will be released. All you will need to do is, run a single script, which will upgrade the database schema and replace the old application instances with the newer version. During this process, a rolling upgrade methodology is used to ensure minimum downtime. Also, the state of the new instance is automatically monitored, and if it fails for any reason, the cluster will be rolled back to the previous version.

6. Standardization – Using Docker containers ensure consistency across multiple environments. As long as you deploy the same Docker image, you know it will behave in the same manner no matter where it is hosted. Even if you wish to customize your Unica installation, you can update the Docker files in one place and then use the same image in all your deployments. There is no need to make the same changes in multiple installations. You can also use a version control tool to archive those changes in case you need to reference previous work.

7. Continuous deployment and testing –With this improved upgrade approach, you can break down significant changes into multiple small steps. Then test each of these steps, and be confident that those changes will be reliably deployed into production. On the other hand, if something goes wrong in production, that Docker image can be copied to a test environment to reproduce the issue, and analyze the cause. Then test and fix without worrying about the hassle of setting up an identical environment. ​

8. Hardware Elasticity- As described earlier, Docker containers separate applications from the host operating system and hardware, so you can reuse the same Docker image even when you change your hardware configuration. This separation also allows you to dynamically add or remove hardware to fit your technical and budget needs by simply adding or removing the number of running containers. Kubernetes takes this separation even further by hiding the server details from the applications. For example, when a busy shopping season arrives, which will last only a short period, you can add a few servers and notify Kubernetes that those servers are available. And Kubernetes will deploy Dockerized application containers to those servers. Once you are past the increased load, you simply notify Kubernetes those servers are unavailable it will adjust the deployment and scale down.

9. Cost Saving – As you can see, the Docker offering for Unica will save you time and reduce installation and upgrade costs. Also, thanks to elasticity, you can save on hardware costs as well. ​

10. Cloud Readiness – Moving services to the cloud is becoming more common because of the various benefits it offers. If your organization decides to move applications to the cloud, or simply wish to carry out a prior test run, Dockerization makes this easy. This is true even with customized Docker images because the Dockerization feature of Unica products is designed to be technology agnostic, i.e., it would work on multiple cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, Azure, or even a private cloud hosted in your own IT infrastructure.