Why you should consider adopting Containers in 2021

Why you should adopt Containers in 2021

DevOps and Container Technology

With the constant demand for changing environments, DevOps and Container technology can work well when combined. Containers help to keep the development more agile and also ensures continuous delivery thus making containers a great tool for the DevOps process.

Containers provide an approach to package the application’s source code, libraries, configuration files, and all dependencies in a single object. This object is then able to run applications from a small to a large complex. Containers offer OS-level virtualization that allows you to share the operating system on a server and run it as an isolated resource. Unlike virtual machines, containers do not contain images for the operating system which makes them light-weight and portable. 

If you are working on a large project then you can deploy multiple containers which can be managed by a container orchestrator. Containerization simplifies the DevOps process by reducing the interdependencies between IT operations and the Dev team. Containerization helps to streamline the development and production process. By including a container method will positively transform DevOps.

Understanding the role of containers in DevOps

By leveraging containers in the DevOps process you will be able to serve your customers faster, better, and effectively continuously. You must adopt a solid strategy to build and maintain a container environment. Though DevOps eased the software delivery process containerization will fast-paced your application delivery in an efficient way. Before applying the container, you should understand a few points for effective container management in DevOps.

Integration with IT

The main selection criteria for the container technology is how well and easily it gets integrated with existing IT enterprises without impacting its working pipeline and DevOps process. By far, storage management is considered to be the most important integration point for containers, if it gets integrated with it efficiently then it will work well with the current DevOps process.

Security and compliance framework

Ensuring that the container is in the line with the security and compliance framework of the company is important for DevOps success. You can ensure safety and compliance by continuous scanning, creating a private repository, and documenting rules for it. 

Support hybrid infrastructure

Containers are dynamic and can be stored on various platforms as per the business requirement. You can host containers on-premise VMs, off-premise container service, off-premise VMs, and many more. But in some cases, organizations require multiple container services that require hybrid infrastructure to improve performance.

Microservices

With the help of microservices, you can easily break down large applications into smaller components which can be added to larger applications. It is not necessary to run large applications at a time, but you can deploy smaller components individually that will speed up the process and reduce turnaround time. You can deploy each microservice within a container.

PAAS and FAAS

Container adoption works well for Platform as a Service and Function as a Service due to the flexibility of the container. The container helps PaaS to easily onboard the legacy applications and allows FaaS to delay the code releases.

Application-centric container management

It allows the policy-driven deployment, monitoring, alerting, scaling, and updates of the container applications without imposing any infrastructure restrictions. Application-centric container management provides an abstraction layer on top of different container services that allows the customer to deploy their application in the private or public cloud.

Benefits of containers in DevOps

Containers ensure a streamlined process that allows you to build, test, deploy, and redeploy applications or programs in multiple environments. Containerization offers immense benefits to simplify the DevOps workflow. Some of the benefits are mentioned below.

• Provide simple updates- if you want to deliver software continuously then applications need to be updated in a constant and streamlined manner. Containers allow easy software or application updates. Containers allow applications to be distributed in multiple microservices and an update to a small part of your application does not impact other parts of the application.
• Containers support multiple Frameworks– DevOps allows the agility to switch between multiple programming frameworks and containers. With containers, you can run any type of application irrespective of the language they are written in. You can then move those containers easily among different hosts.
• Makes DevOps workflow consistent- whenever you create and deploy your application within a container, the environment remains the same throughout the delivery chain. This process provides better team collaboration and makes it easy as every team member is working in the same containerized environment.
• Cost-saving-  unlike VMs, containers do not need OS which may include a cost. Containers run side by side and share the OS kernel of a single physical machine. Also, containers do not require allocation of resources and work on microservices which minimizes the resource overhead.
• Faster agility- creating a new container is much faster than setting up a new virtual machine. Once deployed, containers can easily scale as per the growing business demands and data.
• Containers are immutable- containers come with precise and controlled environments to create a CI/CD pipeline. Containers are immutable, the software that is tested will be the same as the software to be deployed without any discrepancies.
• Ensures security- to maintain container security, the lifetime of the container needs to be reduced to protect it from hackers which gives them a little window to play. You can also refresh containers every minute or so and it keeps the containers up-to-date.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, here’s what Containers can do for you: They can get more applications running on the same hardware than other technologies; they make it easy for developers to quickly create ready-to-run containered applications; and they make managing and deploying applications much easier.

So we have seen how the Container technology is overtaking the entire software world by a storm. Containers are not a technology but more of a revolution, it is just a matter of time when all software applications will be using and running on Containers. So now is the time to think and decide if you have already not started using containers within your organisation, to make a try and adopt Containers as a part of your codebase.