AlphaBravo - Containerization
Containers are a solution to the problem: how do you get software to run reliably when moved from one computing environment to another.
This could be from a developer's laptop to a test environment, from a staging environment into production, and perhaps from a physical machine in a data center to a virtual machine in a private or public cloud.
What is a Container?
Containers offer a logical packaging mechanism in which applications can be abstracted from the environment in which they actually run. This decoupling allows container-based applications to be deployed easily and consistently, regardless of whether the target environment is a private data center, the public cloud, or even a developer’s personal laptop. Containerization provides a clean separation of concerns, as developers focus on their application logic and dependencies, while IT operations teams can focus on deployment and management without bothering with application details such as specific software versions and configurations specific to the app.
Containerized software will always run the same, regardless of the environment. Containers isolate software from its surroundings, for example differences between development and staging environments and help reduce conflicts between teams running different software on the same infrastructure.
Containers vs VM’s
Containerized applications can be started almost instantly. That means containers can be instantiated in a "just in time" fashion when they are needed and can disappear when they are no longer required, freeing up resources on their hosts.
Rather than run an entire complex application inside a single container, the application can be split in to modules (such as the database, the application front end, and so on). This is the microservices approach. Applications built in this way are easier to manage, each module is relatively simple, and changes can be made to modules without having to rebuild the entire application. Because containers are so lightweight, individual modules (or microservices) can be instantiated only when they are needed and are available almost immediately.
Application Modernization
Containerization enables IT organizations to easily modernize traditional applications without requiring modifications to the source code.
By containerizing the application, traditional applications gain modern properties like hybrid cloud portability, security, agility, reliability, and cost efficiency.
Modernizing traditional applications delivers immediate value and cost savings to organizations without waiting for full rearchitecture or recoding of the existing application. Once applications are containerized, organizations begin to save money on infrastructure and operational costs delivering a faster time-to-value.
With the drastic growth of enterprises running workloads using containers in production, DevOps has been identified as a key part of their IT strategy moving forward.
