Without a doubt, containers have changed the face of cloud computing. Having your application in a single package containing all the resources you need to run provides software developers a wide variety of advantages, and we at copebit can’t endorse containers enough. Here are the chief reasons why companies should use containers:
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Portability
Once a container has been built, you can run it on whatever platform you want. By its nature, a container has been constructed with everything you need to run the application. It can be easily run on different environments, such as physical or virtual, for testing or production, and whether on public, private, or hybrid clouds. This grants you a fair amount of flexibility, as you can quickly switch between environments to suit your needs and saves a significant amount of time from the development process.
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Use fewer resources
Containers are a resource friendly solution as they don’t need a separate OS to run. In comparison, virtual machines require storage amounting several gigabytes while a container requirement can normally be measured in megabytes. Apart from that, containers can run the same number of workloads using fewer resources compared to VMs. You will need less hardware to run them, resulting in saving on infrastructure and operational costs.
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Isolated packages
Given the way containerized applications are packaged, they are effectively independent of each other. If one fails, the rest are not affected. This maintains your application’s security and stability — a breach on one means the others are not affected.
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Rapid deployment and management
Given they don’t need an OS, it takes only a few moments to create, start, or delete containers. This shortens the operational process, the development cycle, and time to market. By reducing time for a software to be released, and the time needed for patches, it’s easier to realize profits and offer a better customer experience.
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Quick and easy horizontal scaling
If you need to, it is a simple matter to add multiple copies of containers in a cluster. Coupled with smart scaling, you will only run the containers that you need at any given time. This results in lower operational costs since you only employ resources you need at the moment, hence why large companies like Google use container scaling.
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Easy to manage host system
In a VM system, each VM has its own OS. Containers, however, are isolated from the host OS. As such, the host OS doesn’t require various additional software for the applications to work. Managing the host OS (e.g. applying patches) becomes simple and easy.
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Development efficiency
Containers provide other advantages. The isolation they provide makes it easier to test and debug as there are fewer factors to consider with their identical environments. It is quicker to update applications as it takes only a few moments to alter the config file, start new containers, and delete the old ones. Some types of container tools provide other benefits, such as version control and the ability to share containers with your co-workers. Given its variety of benefits, it’s no wonder that containers are seeing widespread adoption among companies. At copebit, our experts have the skills and years of experience companies need for their first bold step into containerization. We have mastered not just in the most popular container platform, Docker, but also in the most widely-used container orchestration system, Kubernetes. Similarly, we have expanded our expertise to include other crucial AWS services, such as Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service), AWS Fargate, and Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service). Learn more about our container services here and inquire about us here. 