Containerization Of Applications

Many companies have already started developing containerized applications for their clients and many more companies started thinking about the possibility of migrating their existing legacy applications into containers.

So let’s understand some basics of containerization in software application development.

What is a container?

Containers are the technology that allows us to run a process in an isolated environment and the process will think that it is the only process running in a completely new computer.

Containers will share the kernel of the host operating system

But, each container are using its own binaries/libraries loaded with them.

In short, containers are the lightweight, stand-alone and executable package of software components and it contains all libraries, configurations, and other dependencies to run the application,

So, we can run multiple containers inside a computer with a single host OS.

This is the core difference between virtual machine concept and container concept.

The below diagram will help us to understand the difference easily.

As we can see in the above diagram, in virtual machines, we install multiple operating systems using some virtualizer like hypervisor and run the application on it.

But in containers we are sharing the host OS resources in a very efficient way by using the container engine like Docker.

Benefits of Containers

Some of the key benefits of containers are,

• Need less resources than traditional environments as it doesn’t include operating system images
• Portability – it is easy to deploy the container into different environments without worrying about the hardware and operating systems
• Consistent Operations - Applications in the container will execute the same regardless of where they are deployed
• Applications in the containers can be more rapidly deployed, patched, and Scaled
• Better Application Development – Containers support Agile and DevOps effort to increase the speed of development, test, and deployment.

Conclusion 

Since this article is just an introduction to containerization of applications, I have included some basics only.

I will try to explain more about containers, Docker, Kubernetes, etc in my coming articles.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Learning