What are containers, and why do you need them?

Containers exist to feature the reliable running of the software when moving from one environment to another. The situation could be either from the developer’s laptop to the test environment, from a staging environment to production, or from a physical machine in the data center to a virtual machine in the public cloud. The containers solve this problem by containerizing the application platform, its entire runtime environment, and its dependencies.

Containerizing the whole application mitigates the OS distributions and underlying infrastructure. The three main factors that influence containers to play a role in DevOps are,

Dependency: Libraries, configurations, runtime engine, program tools, etc. of an app bundled can be shared with N number of systems using the same OS, which increases collaboration!

Disposability: Easy to pull any data and app requirement in a system and discard the entire container from running when the system does not require anything additional.

Concurrency: Containers use CPU power efficiently, unlike VMs. This has proven to help create auto-scale abilities with any architecture model, especially while using the cloud. Improves automated development!

Recommendations: The State of Containers: Unraveling a Few Mysteries

Use cases of containers

• Lift and Shift — Some organizations leverage containers to migrate their application from traditional to more modern infrastructure. Using containers like this offers the basic benefits of system virtualization. However, this does not offer the benefits of modular container-based application architecture.
• Refactor existing application — Refactoring is more intensive than lift and shift migration, but it offers full benefits of the container environment.
• Provide better support to microservices architecture — Using containers, applications, and microservices can more easily be isolated, deployed, and scaled.
• Provide easier deployment — Containers are being deployed to support one or more similar processes, which often run in the background, such as ETL functions or batch jobs.

Benefits of containers

The size of a container is only a few tens of megabytes. As compared to VMs, which take gigabytes of space, containers take just a fraction of it. As a result, a single server has the capacity to host thousands of containers.

The second major benefit of containerizing applications is that they can be instantiated in a “just in time” fashion whenever they are needed. This is a major benefit over the use of VMs as instantiating VMs take more time to boot up their OS and consumes a lot of server resources. On the contrary, when containers are no longer needed, they can free up resources on their hosts.

Thirdly, containers offer modularity. Rather than running a completely sophisticated application inside a single container, the application is bifurcated into small modules such as the database, the application front end, and so on.

Application built in a modular fashion is fairly simple to manage. As containers are so lightweight, individual modules can be instantiated when they are needed and are available almost instantly.

Conclusion

In short, containers are secure, efficient, and portable solutions that focus on virtualizing the OS rather than on the hardware level. This blog narrates down three major benefits of container technology and how they assist you down the line. Let me know in the comments below if you have any valuable information to add to this list.