Containerization at a Glance
Containerization has gained immense popularity over the years in this fast-growing IT industry. The benefits it brings to the table has had a direct effect on its popularity. But before we start looking into the benefits of containerization, let us first understand the concept.
What are containers?
A container is a lightweight, stand-alone executable application or package that includes all the dependencies needed to run it.
Application containers are no different than physical containers we use in day to day life. We use physical containers to ship product and goods, same way application containers are used to package the application along with necessary dependencies and runtime such that it can run independently on suitable platforms. They can be used to package software and applications of any size and type.
Containerization has revolutionized the process of building, testing, deploying applications. They are playing a very important role in moving towards microservices from monolithic applications. Let us take a look at some of the major benefits of using containers to deploy our applications.
Benefits of using containers:
Portability: Applications running on containers are not dependent on host OS. Which allows us to run them anywhere irrespective of platform. This also allow us to move our application from one platform to another without any difficulty.
Reduced overheard: Before containers came into picture, virtual machines were used to isolate and organize applications. But due to presence of host OS and bulky nature, it was difficult to manage and orchestrate these environments. Containers are light weight, OS independent which uses host OS. So, they share the libraries and resources as and when needed. They are fast to boot and easy to manage with so many orchestration tools available now.
Ease of CI/CD and consistency: Build and deployment process has become smoother. DevOps teams no longer need to worry about where the applications will be run as the containers can be deployed on any platform without extra setup.
Faster delivery: Containerization has helped to reduce testing and deployment time.
Best for Microservices: Industry is rapidly moving from monolithic applications to microservice architecture. Containers play the most important role in microservice architecture.
Easy scaling and support: Containers are also very helpful while the system needs to be scaled based on traffic of need. Kubernetes, Docker compose etc. are some of the orchestration tools which make it very easy to instantly scale the containerized system on demand.
To sum up, containerization offers us isolation, portability, scalability, speedy development, testing and deployment process and better control over the application lifecycle. All these are reasons why containerization has gained popularity over the years.
