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Zoom in: Containerization in cloud

Containerization is a huge topic of debate in the recent past. Containerization has become the major trend in software development and is the most preferred alternative to virtualization. Application Containers certainly have the right set of buzzwords covered- they are cloud-based, highly scalable, serverless, lightweight, and of course Agile.

According to recent research, more than 50% of the global businesses run on containerization, and this trend is predicted to go up by 20% more in the next two years.

Containerization is becoming the clear choice for businesses worldwide and most preferred over virtual machines. Let’s read more about how cloud can forge a path for containerization in this blog.

What is Containerization?

Containerization or Application Containers involves packaging software code and all its dependencies in such a way that it can run consistently on any infrastructure. This technology is currently trending because of the measurable benefits that it offers to overall software infrastructure, developers, and ops team.

Containerization is able to achieve continuity of modularization of DevOps, enabling developers to work on separate features, at the same time, without affecting the main application

Containerization is able to achieve continuity of modularization of DevOps, enabling developers to work on separate features, at the same time, without affecting the main application. Application containers are more preferred due to their promise of a better streamlined, lightweight, easy-to-deploy, secure way of implementing infrastructure requirements over their alternative virtual machines.

A Brief History of Containerization

The concept of application containers is at least a decade old but it started garnering attention with the emergence of open source Docker Engine in 2013. This was considered the industry standard for application containers because of its ease of use for developers and universal packaging appeal that helped accelerate the adoption of this technology worldwide.

With more businesses adopting this technology, a stark improvement in application quality as well as reduction in defects was seen making more businesses move the application container way.

How Do Cloud Containers Work?

Containerization has roots in partitioning and chroot process isolation, which is developed as part of Linux. The modern forms are expressed in application containerization, such as in system containerization, Docker, and Linux containers (LXC). Both these types allow IT teams to extract application code from the existing infrastructure, further simplify the existing version and deploying successfully across environments with reduced defects.

The key point to understand when working with Containers is that isolation boundaries are created at application level and not at server level. What this essentially means is if anything goes wrong in a single container, for example excessive consumption of resources, only that single container gets affected and not the whole VM or the server

Containers are deployed with the help of virtual isolation and the applications are run via a shared OS kernel by reducing the need for Virtualisation. The Containers essentially hold all the necessary files, libraries and essential environments that are required to run the platform without having to worry about platform compatibility.

The key point to understand when working with Containers is that isolation boundaries are created at application level and not at server level. What this essentially means is if anything goes wrong in a single container, for example excessive consumption of resources, only that single container gets affected and not the whole VM or the server. This eliminates the issue of compatibility between these containerized applications that reside in the same operating systems.

Uses of Cloud Containerization

Introducing cloud containers in businesses will be beneficial due to easy portability, both internally and cloud combined with low cost, which makes them a great alternative to VM. Cloud containerization offers great benefits to developers and development teams. To name a few benefits:

Agile: Compared to VMs, Containers are simpler to set up. The tools required by developers are available universally and easy to use too. This allows for quicker development and deployment of these application containers across any OS. Developers leverage this key feature to accelerate workflows and achieve better efficiency.
Low Cost & Better Performance: Containers do not need a complete guest OS or hypervisor. This reduces overhead time and results in quicker boot times, better performance and smaller memory footprints. For businesses looking at optimizing costs, this helps save on server and licensing costs too. This way Containerization helps with greater server efficiency as well as low cost.
Portability: Container applications work independently and create executable software packages which are not dependent on the host operating system. Thus, they are easily portable and can run uniformly across platforms or cloud.
Fault Isolation: One of the best advantages of containers is if one container fails, others sharing the OS kernel are not affected due to the user space isolation between the two. This is largely beneficial while working on microservices-based services since many different components come together to support larger programs. Microservices can be repaired, redeployed without causing application downtime.
High Efficiency: Software in containerized environments works by sharing the machine’s OS kernels. The application layers within a container can be shared across other containers too. Since the containers are smaller in capacity, they require lesser start up time which allows higher efficiency and reduces costs as discussed earlier.
Ease of Management: An application container platform automates the installation, scaling up, and managing workloads and services. These services can be eased by rolling out new versions, monitoring and debugging cluttered systems. This ease of management helps increase efficiency and prevent unnecessary security threats as well.

Value by Adopting Cloud Containerization

In a nutshell, containerization eliminates the need for an entire OS for each application. Independent scaling, easy management, portability, agility, fault isolation definitely makes it worthwhile for businesses to explore this option over VMs.

Admins, developers and site engineers definitely stand to benefit a great deal by moving to containerization over full blown VMs. Finally, Containerization helps build a resilient workforce with integrated workflows and enable standardizing end to end DevOps, which is key for any software business to thrive and achieve business continuity. Realize your benefits by deploying cloud containers today, and make your business agile.

Guest contributor Prasad Wani is the Founder and Director of Techpartner Alliance, a trusted IT advisor to customers, with end to end expertise and depth in the IT infrastructure space, being industry and technology agnostic. Any opinions expressed in this article are strictly that of the author.

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