What is Containerization

• Defining Containerization

  Defining Containerization

  Traditionally, application code was developed in a specific computing environment. Relocating application code to another environment, such as from computer systems to virtual machines, often resulted in bugs and errors. Containerization removes this problem by isolating application code and dependencies in an isolated user space known as containers. As containers are small and lightweight, they require less start-up time, enabling development and operational teams to quickly test and run applications on any environment, platform, or infrastructure. This drives higher efficiencies by enabling developers to create, run, and deploy applications faster and more securely.
• What Are the Benefits of Containerization?

  What Are the Benefits of Containerization?

  Containerization helps resolve application management issues. Using containerization technology, developers can write applications once and run them on different physical and virtual servers conveniently without requiring an entire operating system. Containerization includes various benefits:

  • High Portability of Applications
    One of the major benefits of containers is they enable developers to move the containerized applications from one to many servers quickly. Unlike a traditional computing environment, where the transfer of applications from one system to another may lead to integration issues with the operating system, the transfer of containerized applications is much easier and faster due to their high portability, which reduces inconsistencies.
  • Promotes Rapid Development Environment
    Containerization offers faster feedback on application performance, enabling development teams to make changes in the source code if required. It also allows development teams to track those changes as soon as the application starts running. This helps in promoting a rapid development environment and enhancing productivity. Additionally, it saves time and increases efficiency by reducing dependency errors and simplifying the application installation process.
  • Improved Scalability Containerization allows applications to scale instantly. Teams can scale specific functions of the application in real time by adding or removing resources from the containers without affecting the performance of the entire application. For instance, developers can scale database components without impacting the front-end servers.
  • Enhanced Security Containerization provides enhanced security by encapsulating all the application's crucial information, such as code and functionalities. This allows quick and easy sharing of specific resources among internal and external teams and provides enhanced security of application resources.
  • Simple and Fast Deployment Containerization simplifies and speeds up the application deployment and configuration process. Containers are small and lightweight, so they boot faster and require fewer resources for their deployment. Moreover, they can be deployed on multiple virtual servers and different cloud platforms such as Google Cloud and AWS.
• Use Cases

  Use Cases

  • Virtual machines are great when applications require full functionality of the operating system to run or when multiple applications need to be deployed on a server. Containers are used to minimize the number of servers used to run multiple applications.

  • Containerization is often preferred for tasks with shorter life cycles, while virtualization is used for tasks with longer life cycles. It can also be used for extended periods.
• What Applications and Services Are Commonly Containerized?

  What Applications and Services Are Commonly Containerized?

  Almost every application deployed on a virtual machine can be containerized. Outlined below are a few components of computing paradigms that are well-suited for containerization.

  • Databases: The data in databases is divided into horizontal shards or partitions to spread the load. These shards can easily be containerized with their own set of databases and don’t require connecting to the monolithic database.
  • Microservices: The architecture of microservices is easy to split and can be containerized efficiently. These containerized microservices can be decommissioned anytime when needed.
  • Containers Within VMs: Virtual machines can run multiple containers to communicate with application resources and services, maximize hardware utilization, and increase security.
  • Web Servers: Web server containerization requires a few command-line inputs. Once the containerization is done, there’s no need to run the servers on the host.
• Leading Application Containerization Service Providers

  Leading Application Containerization Service Providers

  • Docker Docker is an open-source platform for containers to build, ship, and run applications. It separates applications from the infrastructure by packaging code and image, including system tools, configuration files, libraries, and the crucial resources required to run an application. This helps in delivering software quickly.

  • Kubernetes Google Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that provides a managed environment to scale and deploy containerized applications. Kubernetes includes customized functionalities and some additional features such as:
  • Logging and monitoring
  • Load balancing
  • Automatic software upgrades
  • Automatic scaling
  • Self-healing auto-repair

  • AWS Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a fully managed and scalable container orchestration platform for AWS users to efficiently run containerized applications. It allows the implementation of API calls to launch or stop docker containers and access AWS features, including CloudTrail, load balancers, and more.