In the previous blog post, we learned what is containerization? In this post, lets understand the term Containers.
As per a formal definition, Containers are lightweight packages of your application code together with dependencies such as specific versions of programming language runtimes and libraries required to run your software services.
Containers are a solution to the problem of moving software from one computing environment to another in a reliable manner. This could be a developer's laptop to a test environment, a staging environment to production, or a physical machine in a data center to a virtual machine in a private or public cloud.
Problems arise when the supporting software environment is not identical. You're going to test using Python 2.7, and then it's going to run on Python 3 in production and something weird will happen. Or you will rely on the behavior of a specific version of an SSL library and another will be installed. You'll run your tests on Debian while production is on RedHat, and strange things will happen.
Its not always just different software that can cause problems. The networking topology might be different or the security policies and storage might be different but the software has to run on it.
Just as physical containers make the migration easy for all kinds of goods, software containers simplify the movement of applications and services.
How do containers solve this problem?
Simply put, a container consists of an entire runtime environment: an application, plus all its dependencies, libraries and other binaries, and configuration files needed to run it, bundled into one package. Differences in OS distributions and underlying infrastructure are abstracted away by containerizing the application platform and its dependencies.
What are containers?
Containers are a form of operating system virtualization. These are lightweight packages of your application code together with dependencies such as specific versions of programming language runtimes and libraries required to run your software services quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another.
Containers make it simple to share CPU, memory, storage, and network resources at the operating system level and provide a logical packaging mechanism for abstracting applications from the environment in which they run.
Benefits of containers
Containers simplify the development, testing, deployment, and redeployment of applications across multiple environments, from a developer's local laptop to an on-premises data center and even the cloud. Benefits of containers include:
1. Less overhead
Because they do not include operating system images, containers require fewer system resources than traditional or hardware virtual machine environments.
2. Increased portability
Containerized applications can be easily deployed to a variety of operating systems and hardware platforms.
3. More consistent operation
DevOps teams understand that applications running in containers will perform the same regardless of where they are deployed.
4. Greater efficiency
Containers enable applications to be deployed, patched, or scaled more quickly.
5. Better application development
Containers help agile and DevOps teams speed up development, testing, and production cycles.
What are containers used for?
Containers provide a logical packaging mechanism for abstracting applications from the environment in which they run. This decoupling makes it possible to deploy container-based applications easily and consistently, regardless of whether the target environment is a private data center, the public cloud, or even a developer's personal laptop.
Agile development
Containers enable your developers to work much faster by eliminating concerns about dependencies and environments.
Efficient operations
Containers are tiny and allow you to use only the computing resources you require. This allows you to run your applications more efficiently.
Run anywhere
Containers can operate almost anywhere. Containers can run your software wherever you want.
Use cases for containers
Containers are becoming more popular, particularly in cloud environments. Many organisations are even considering using containers instead of VMs as the general-purpose compute platform for their applications and workloads. However, within that broad scope, there are key use cases where containers are particularly relevant.
1. Microservices
Containers are small and lightweight, making them ideal for microservice architectures, in which applications are built from many, loosely coupled, independently deployable smaller services.
2. DevOps
Many teams that embrace DevOps as a way to build, ship, and run software use microservices as an architecture and containers as a platform as a foundation.
3. Hybrid, multi-cloud
Containers are an ideal underlying architecture for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud scenarios in which organizations operate across multiple public clouds in addition to their own data center because they can run consistently anywhere, including laptops, on-premises, and cloud environments.
4. Application modernizing and migration
One of the most common approaches to application modernization begins with containerizing them in order to migrate them to the cloud.
It's important to understand that containers aren't just a passing trend. They provide scalability, portability, and security advantages, making containers an essential methodology for workload deployment now and in the future.
In the next blog post, we will discuss how containers differ from virtual machines.
Thank you for reading!
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