Containerization technology has completely revolutionized organizational processes such as software development, testing, packaging and development, of any size. According to Gartner, nearly three-fourth of global organizations will run over two containerized applications. A container image – standalone, executable and lightweight software package – encompasses everything required to run it. These include system libraries, tools, settings, runtime and code.
Modern enterprises run a significant percentage of their operations on virtual machines. A container image, in contrast to VMs, assumes most capabilities of an operating system from the hosted system on the machine. Currently, organizations cannot agree more that using containers technology makes software development flawless.
Organizations must plan for both long- and short-term cloud containerization strategies for completely leveraging their benefits. Key factors such as the degree of infrastructure abstraction, governance, organizational culture, internal compliance, and security, must be considered while orchestrating a container strategy. To ensure a successful cloud containerization initiative and transform the way of building solutions, organizations need to consider key benefits of using containers.
What Are Key Benefits of Containerization Technology?
Infrastructure Optimization and Scalability
Only if the components being moved to containers are designed as disposable, they can be scaled efficiently by the platform. Additionally, these containers scale with the efficiency similar to resources as they perform in their current state. This is unless broken down into concrete components to realize true differential scaling. The optimization and scaling of the infrastructure can be primarily attributed to the orchestration. Benefits such as elastic and dynamic provisioning as well as maximized resource density are realized.
Operational Consistency
When organizations opt for an application container orchestration platform, they leverage image-based deployment to build consistency. It provides them with infrastructure-as-a-code abreast their application containers for consistent creation and automatic maintenance of the topology.
It also ensures designing disposable components and enables high availability along with standardized scaling, leading to operational consistency. The benefits span from equivalent administration of diverse nodes to improved consistency across cloud environments.
Concrete Resilience
In case of siloed containerization of applications is moved to a container, little benefit do the organizations gain in terms of resilience. The entire application can still fall down by a memory leak in just one function. With concrete components, organizations have the benefit of providing a more discreet resilience.
New functions can be safely deployed or changed to existing ones without any risk to any other function. If a component fails, it does not impact other components. Concrete components comprise much less libraries and code, and as a result, their restart times are faster.
Productivity and Agility
In terms of productivity and agility, organizations benefit from faster maintenance cycles, higher build velocity and self-service resource provisioning. However, while adopting the containers technology, organizations must also focus on organizational decentralization and transform with concrete components.
It is necessary that they manage these components through container orchestration and follow an agile development methodology. The development methodology must be strengthened by an image-based deployment and automated pipeline. This further leads to benefits such as standardized deployment mechanism and simplified testing of remote components.
Pipeline Automation
Modern cloud environments enable installing through scripts, which helps organizations simply add them to an automated pipeline without the need for proprietary installation tools. Concrete containers enable organizations to make more independent and rapid changes and iterate more quickly on these changes via the build pipeline automation. Builds can be triggered by actions easily on the repository of source code.
Organizations can use the image repository’s resultant update to test early cloud environments and stimulate automated deployments. Organizations benefit from using standardized commands, rather than complex ones, to install, compile and deploy to facilitate automation and subsequent maintenance of the deployment and build pipeline.
Winding Up
Container adoption is growing unabated and at a rapid rate. It is touted that containers will redefine hybrid cloud architecture and disrupt the DevOps industry. Also, containers will bridge the gap between cloud and on-premise environments in the modern business world of cloud computing and digital transformation.