Back to Glossary »

Containers are stand-alone, lightweight software packages that include everything needed to run a piece of software, such as code, runtime, libraries, and system tools. Unlike traditional virtualization, containers share the host operating system’s kernel, enabling efficient resource utilization and fast startup times. Containers ensure consistency and portability across different environments, facilitating development, testing, and deployment. Tools like Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift support containerization, providing orchestration, scaling, and management capabilities that enable agile, resilient, and scalable application architectures.

 

Use Cases

Microservices Architecture Deployment

  • Objective: To isolate and manage individual components of a microservices-based application.
  • Scope: Utilize containers to package and run each microservice, thereby ensuring encapsulation, scalability, and independence.
  • Advantage: Enables fine-grained scaling and easier management of complex, distributed applications.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) Pipelines

  • Objective: To achieve seamless automation in code building, testing, and deployment.
  • Scope: Incorporate containers into CI/CD pipelines to ensure that each stage runs in an identical environment, from development to production.
  • Advantage: Eliminates discrepancies between different phases of development, resulting in a more reliable delivery process.

Dev/Test Environment Standardization

  • Objective: To create consistent development and testing environments.
  • Scope: Use containers to package development environments, complete with all the required dependencies, configurations, and tools.
  • Advantage: Facilitates onboarding of new developers and ensures that tests are conducted in an environment that mimics production.

Resource-Efficient Application Isolation

  • Objective: To run multiple isolated applications on a single host machine without the overhead of full virtualization.
  • Scope: Leverage containers to segregate applications, allowing them to share the host OS kernel while maintaining isolation.
  • Advantage: Maximizes resource utilization and reduces overhead costs compared to traditional virtual machines.

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Deployments

  • Objective: To ensure application portability across multiple cloud providers or between on-premises and cloud environments.
  • Scope: Package applications in containers to ensure they can run anywhere without modification, irrespective of the underlying infrastructure.
  • Advantage: Simplifies multi-cloud strategy and migration efforts, offering flexibility and preventing vendor lock-in.

 

Links