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Journey to Containers

You want a modern, future-proof architecture? Containers (Container Orchestration) has it. You want to build that slick architecture while also leveraging the latest innovations in distributed systems and large-scale application development? Yep, Containerization has that too.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could pack your application, with ALL its dependencies, into a dedicated box and run it anywhere? No matter what software dependencies the host system has installed, or where and what the host system actually is? That’s the idea of containerization. Create a container which has all the required dependencies pre-installed, put your application code inside of it and run it everywhere the container runtime is installed. No more devs saying: "Well, it works on my machine!"

Short and sweet, containers are isolated, stateless environments.

Containers are lightweight, stand-alone, executable packages of a piece of software that includes everything needed to run it, including code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, settings, etc.

Some like to think of containers as tiny virtual machines, but they're really not. VMs simulate a real machine and have everything a real machine has. While running an app inside a container could be described as being the same, there are some key architectural differences. Mainly, that containers run on the same operating system kernel. Containers share the host operating system, making them significantly smaller and much faster to create and delete. So with containers, your team has the same development environment no matter which operating system they're using. That just makes it incredibly easy for larger teams to be efficient.

Containers are great if you need the flexibility to install and use software with specific version requirements. With containers, you can choose the underlying operating system and have full control of the installed programming language and runtime version.

It's even possible to operate containers with different software stacks throughout a large container fleet—especially interesting if you need to migrate an old, legacy system into a containerized environment. As an added bonus, many tools for managing large-scale container set-ups, like Kubernetes, come with all the best practices already baked in.

Advantages of containers

• Control and flexibility
• Vendor-agnostic
• Easier migration path
• Portability
• Fast scaling
• Faster time-to-market

Whatever you already use traditional servers for would be a great candidate to be put into a container. Choose containers and container orchestrators when you need flexibility, speed of development or when you need to migrate legacy services.

In this short video, we offer a high-level overview of how containers increase delivery velocity.

Enjoy!

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