Why containerization
Containers are a way to bundle a software’s environment to simplify development, installation, and dependency management.
What is containerization
Containerization is the technology of packaging software development code along with all of its necessary dependencies or configurations, including libraries, frameworks, and other dependencies, into a single, isolated “container.” The software or application inside the container can be transported, deployed and used reliably in any environment and on any infrastructure, regardless of the operating system. The container functions as a sort of computing environment or bubble around the software or application, keeping it apart from the actual computing environment. It eases moving or deploying the software or application to a new computing environment.
Benefit of containerization
Lightweight/portable
Containers are “lightweight”, since they can share the operating system kernel of the host computing environment. Containers also do not require additional overhead to run the full virtual operating system, which increases system resource utilisation. It outperforms virtual machine technology in terms of application execution speed, memory consumption, and data storage speed.
Fast startup time
Traditional virtual machines frequently require server minutes to start all services before they are ready for use. Because containers run directly on the host computing environment’s kernel and do not require the startup of any operating system, startup time is measured in seconds.
Improved security
Since containers are isolated from one another, you can be sure that each of your apps is executing in a completely separate environment. Therefore, even if the security of one container is compromised, that host’s other containers are still protected.
Containers can only interact with computational resources in a very limited way and are segregated from each other as well as the host operating system. All of this adds up to a method of deploying apps that is intrinsically more secure.
Flexibility
Containers may be quickly created, deployed to any environment, and utilised to address a wide range of requirements. You may rapidly create a container to handle a task when it arises. You can set it to automatically shut down, when it is no longer required. This method is called orchestration. The process of organising, controlling, scaling, and deleting containers can be achieved very easily.
Ease of management
Containers all run independently, so if one fails, the others will continue to run. Development teams gain the ability to fix errors in one container without affecting others.
Developer-friendly
Containers are developer-friendly, because they allow developers to use a single environment for development and production, which is a common roadblock in application development. The development team may create an app on a Windows laptop that does not run on a Mac workstation. But a containerized application will not run into that issue.