Containers are often being spoken about in the tech world for the extraordinary potential they demonstrate in cloud-native development. While agility and quick releases were on every organization’s wishlist, both seemed difficult due to the rapidly increasing size and complexity of applications. From this very need, containers were born. The massive adoption of containers has made them mainstream and 46% of software developers and IT professionals participating in a survey listed containerization as their top priority.
Gartner predicts that 70% of organizations will run at least two or more containerized applications by 2023 considering the huge momentum the container market is garnering. It comes as no surprise that the application container market is poised to grow at a CAGR of 32% for the forecast period between 2020 and 2028.
The attention containerization is garnering is well-deserved.
Containers offer a host of benefits; many in the arena of public cloud deployments. During the times as early as 2017, organizations were using them mainly for their portability. They were exceedingly being deployed in private clouds, public clouds, and traditional infrastructure. Today, container-based applications and microservices are being implemented the world over for the synergy they share with the cloud.
What draws the attention of most organizations to containers however is their ability to optimize resource management and reduce costs.
Containerization provides the fastest way to modernize
While organizations grapple to strike a balance between ambition and pragmatism, container technology steps up as the perfect solution. It helps them partially modernize applications so that they are up and running in no time in a new environment. Container technology ensures applications run in the same way irrespective of the location they are hosted in.
Containerization breaks down application components into smaller parts and then sends them to different teams that can operate independently. This approach helps organizations wanting to modernize workload to reduce the time to market for code.
Early adopters have been quick to realize the benefits of deploying containers. These included improved security and better speed. Over time, containers started bridging the gaps in orchestration tools and management systems addressing some of the most important challenges enterprises were facing. It was soon becoming evident containers were helping them reduce costs phenomenally while empowering them to achieve more.
So much like Virtual Machines, yet different
Containers are pretty much like virtual machines since both play a key role in isolating space or resources within a physical server to use it for running a virtualized computer to help users use multiple apps.
But there is a difference in the way things are virtualized. While VMs virtualize everything right down to the hardware layers, containers have a more limited approach and virtualize just the software layers above the operating system level.
Containers are agile and light in weight, and enable fast iteration speed since they have just high-level software. VMs, on the other hand, offer a secure means for running a monolith application.
The good part is containers and VMs can co-exist, though the choice largely depends on the resource needs and the trade-offs you will have to accept along the way. There is a growing inclination however toward containers, especially where companies want to modernize their environment.
Save with containers
Containers help save money since they don’t cost much when it comes to scalability or resource consumption. Since containers play a big part in cloud-native development which in turn increases the overall efficiency, containers have become an important part of the journey of modern organizations.
But there are other prominent benefits too that eventually translate into big savings. They are as follows:
Free and open-source – Some of the most popular container platforms such as Docker are free and open source to use. Docker provides an efficient ecosystem for developers and system administrators to build, ship, and run containers in a highly efficient manner. Being an open-source platform, it gives users the freedom to run applications across diverse operating systems and environments. As per a 2020 Developer Survey, 65,000 developers voted in favor of Docker making it the third most loved technology.
Easy to manage – Since containers do not depend on large teams, configuring and managing servers do not cost much. You can even seek help from professional vendors to lower management and configuration costs.
Self-reliant – With self-contained dependencies that are packaged and portable to run, there is absolutely no dependency on dedicated server configuration or the host environment. This helps organizations save a lot of money and time on server configuration.
Low infrastructure costs – OS-level virtualization enables the deployment of several containers on a single host and thus reduces infrastructure costs.
Great teamwork – Containers are enabling developers to work in synergy. There is greater cooperation among infrastructure engineers too. Developers simply create an app and then pack it into the designated container after ensuring all the necessary settings and dependencies are in order. It is then delivered to the infrastructure engineer who can manage with just basic information such as the storage and network requirements of the container. The container then works automatically relying on the self-contained settings to coordinate with the host kernel. This facilitates excellent teamwork between developers and infrastructure engineers.
Enables effective resource management – When using containers like Kubernetes, developers can effortlessly limit the specified raw RAM and CPU values among several other things. For instance, it can help set limits on resource requests to the container and create different classes of pods based on the specific needs of the app. The popularity of Kubernetes is evident from a CNCF survey that says 69% of companies in Europe, 55% of companies in North America, and 54% of the companies in Asia use Kubernetes in production perhaps due to its automation and self-service capabilities.
Uniform environments – Having uniform environments for containers ensures lower maintenance costs. There is environment parity across all stages – product development, testing, and deployment. As a result, even small teams can manage these environments thereby reducing maintenance costs.
Partner with Trigent for all your containerization needs
Container technology is widely used for its ability to speed up deployments, minimize security risks, and reduce complexities. At Trigent, we build a microservice architecture that goes a long way in supporting cloud-native principles of virtualization while offering elasticity through containerization. Our technology experts can help you build cloud-native applications using popular containers such as Docker.
Help us optimize compute resources in the cloud with containers and accelerate value through efficient management of resources and capacity. Call us today for a business consultation.
