Containers: Conversations Today Are No Longer If, But How

If you had asked the question about the importance and role of containers a few years ago, the response would not have been the same as it would be today. Containers have replaced the conventional usage of hardware and virtual machines. But the concept of containers is not new and has been around since the 70s. It first was employed by Unix V7 in 1979 followed by FreeBSD Jails, Linux VServer, Process containers, and many more. Instead of the features offered, the aforementioned containers, they came with a drawback which was their portability.

A container is a standard unit of software that conglomerates up code and all its dependencies, so the application runs apace and assuredly from one computing environment to another. To simplify it further, a container is an isolated environment for the execution of an application. Companies nowadays prefer microservices over the monolithic writing system. The whole process of maintaining a collection of microservices is going to be more challenging than to preserve a monolithic application but many platforms with container orchestration settings like Docker and Kubernetes have emerged. Hence, the deployment of containers has become way more efficient and streamlined than the conventional methods, surmounting the challenges faced before.

With the advent of new software and further evolution of containers, it led to increased IT flexibility and abstractive capabilities eventually resulting in ease of deployment, cost of maintenance, commanding pattern, etc. The persistent usage of containers and scalable microservices has gradually changed the face of software, architecture, and developmental operations.

Since 2013 to date, Docker has been facilitating the process and offers an entire ecosystem for container management. It gave rise to various management platforms like Kubernetes, Docker Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Rancher, and the list goes on. All these platforms offer the best orchestration and control over management intending to make containers more established and recognized.

Containers enable hybrid and multicloud solutions with the potential to deliver superior flexibility with security preferences. The size of virtual machines differs from containers which are much smaller. Therefore, the upcoming future is expected to have more deployments of these on bare-metal servers. The process of containerization secures the applications and monitors it automatically while challenges like platform dependence, hardware maintenance, and networking are being eradicated.

Over the past couple of years, it has become vivid how containers are on the threshold of becoming the foundation constituent to change the outlook on how IT enterprise is managed. Visit our website and sign up for a free demo to get insights into what our company has to offer.