What are containers and how can they help your company?

IT professionals, end users, and business owners are driven by different motivations when choosing technologies to expand their companies' online presence, create mobile applications, or provide software as a service (SaaS). IT professionals often seek ease of use, end users need flexibility and reliability, and business owners want cost-effective solutions. Containers meet all these requirements and more: autonomous applications and services that users can easily deploy, update, scale up or down as needed. They are useful in situations such as moving software from a test environment to production, when a different version of a software library is in use, or when each machine has its own compiler or loader. In the following sections, we will expand on this definition and discuss the benefits, use cases, and ways to use containers.

Definition of containers

When users aim to ensure software runs properly when moving from one computing environment to another, containers are useful because they include all dependencies, so they don't need to be reconfigured in different computing environments. They also form the basis of Kubernetes, which enables deploying multiple containers across multiple nodes. Containers can be distributed via a virtual platform and help companies save money by reducing the number of required applications and services.

Containers are sometimes confused with virtual machines (VMs), which large enterprises use to build virtualized computing environments. VMs allow running multiple operating systems (OS) on a single server, improving resource utilization. Inside each VM, a hypervisor allocates hardware resources, including CPU, memory, storage, and network. Unlike VMs, containers run only applications and their dependencies and access hardware resources through the host operating system's capabilities. The following video details the differences between VMs and containers. Containers first appeared in the 1970s in conjunction with UNIX chroot and have been evolving ever since. By 2019, 20% of companies worldwide used containers, and their usefulness and importance are likely to continue growing. Experts predict that by 2024, more than 70% of organizations globally will use more than two container applications in production.

Benefits of containers

Container technologies are potentially highly cost-effective because other components needed to create an environment for them can be obtained for free. For example, Ubuntu Linux is a free host OS, VirtualBox is a free virtual machine platform, and Docker is free deployment software. Of course, some organizations may choose other options for these sets or pay for larger deployments. However, such a system can be set up without significant financial investment. Containers can be used to deploy and scale websites without affecting other applications and services on the server. Thus, companies can easily add web components to expand their online offerings. Such updates do not require accommodating host computer dependencies. Because containers are isolated, do not compete for host resources, and do not affect host operation, administrators need not worry that each application or service might impact others.

When containers can help

According to a recent Alibaba Cloud blog post, containers are often used in the following cases:

• Microservices architecture. Microservices need to be deployed and managed independently. Containers provide them with isolated runtime environments, simplifying deployment and scaling.
• Multicloud deployment. Multicloud or hybrid cloud solutions allow using containers to deploy applications across various cloud environments and quickly migrate them from one cloud environment to another, on-premises, or vice versa.
• Multitenancy approach. In multitenancy architecture, a single instance serves multiple customers, called tenants. This architecture is fast and lightweight, requiring only seconds to launch.
• Developer productivity and early-stage application development. Developers in early stages of application development can test a version by deploying a container with dependencies. In this scenario, developers can focus more on new product features than on environment setup and debugging.
• Easy configuration and DevOps adoption. With containers, users only need to put configurations into code and deploy it. Containers support a continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD) pipeline for continuous development and DevOps configurations.

How to use containers

To get started with containers, users need to become familiar with tools such as Docker and Podman, as well as Linux, writing container manifests in JSON, and the Kubernetes container management platform. The next step is to run Docker to start deploying containers. The Cloud Native Wiki also recommends following these best practices:

• Use fine-grained components. The smaller the component, the easier it is to orchestrate.
• Prefer disposable components. Whenever possible, design and build containers to be stateless and lightweight.
• Ensure container security. It is critical to implement security measures and policies across the container environment.
• Use container orchestrators. A popular open-source option is Kubernetes.
• Automate the pipeline. Automation allows for fast iteration and making necessary changes.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC). IaC allows defining various aspects of infrastructure in declarative files that automate the process.
• Practice agile development. Agile methodologies help teams improve the development lifecycle.
• Promote developer self-service experience. Teams should be able to self-provision their projects.

Does your company need containers?

Your company may need containers if you have one or more of the following requirements:

• Speed. Creating, replicating, or destroying containers in seconds.
• Scalability. Due to the speed of deploying and destroying containers, they allow creating additional instances of the same application.
• Portability. Ability to run anywhere, including Linux, Windows, or macOS, as well as virtual machines, bare-metal servers, or a developer's laptop.
• Resource efficiency. Containers require fewer resources, so many more can run on a server compared to virtual machines.
• Performance. Developers can create predictable runtime environments that perform consistently regardless of where they are deployed.