What is Containerization in Digital Transformation?

Containerization in Digital Transformation

Over the next 2 years, 61% of container technology adopters expect more than 50% of their existing & new applications to be on containers.

Many of the organizations nowadays decouple their complex monolithic applications into modular manageable microservices packaged in containers which can be linked together. Containers are grouped into deployable computing units called pods, which contain shared network and storage resources & specifications of how to run the containers. Pods run on physical or virtual machines with CPU and RAM resources. Nodes are managed by a container orchestration layer and pool together into more powerful machines called clusters. Clusters are distributed among individual nodes to execute programs. 

What is Containerization ?

Containerization is the package of software code with operating system(OS) libraries required to run the code to create a lightweight executable container that runs on any infrastructure.

Containerization architecture consists of 4 essential component layers.

• Underlying IT infrastructure
• Host operating system
• Container image
• Containerized applications

Benefits of Containerization

Containerization offers benefits to developers and development teams, especially in following areas:

Portability
Container creates an executable package of software code that is abstracted away from the host operating system. So it is portable and able to run uniformly and consistently across any platform. 

Agility
Development and deployment of containers increases agility and allows applications to work in cloud environments that meet business needs.

Speed
Containers share the machine’s operating system as a result “lightweight” feature is achieved, which not only drives higher server efficiencies but also rescues server and licensing costs and speeds up start times.

Fault isolation
Teams can identify and correct any technical issues in one container without any downtime in other containers. The container engine can leverage any OS security isolation techniques like SELinux access control to isolate faults within containers.

Efficiency
Containers are smaller in capacity than a VM and require less start-up time, allowing far more containers to run on the same compute capacity as a single VM. This capability increases resource optimization and drives server efficiencies, reducing costs of server and license. 

Ease of management
Containerization, when paired with an orchestration platform like Kubernetes, automates and simplifies provisioning, deployment and management of containerized applications.

Security
Security can be defined to automatically block unwanted components entering containers or limit communications with unnecessary resources preventing invasion of malicious code from affecting other containers.

How does Containerization work ?

Containerization involves building software packages of the machines they run on. Developers create and deploy container images, where files that contain necessary information to run a containerized application. They use containerization tools to build container images based on Open container Initiative(OCI) Image specification. These images are read-only and cannot be altered by the computer system.

Container images are the top layer with the following layers.

Infrastructure
It is the hardware layer of the container model. It refers to a bare-metal server that runs the containerized application.

Operating system
The second layer is the operating system. Linux is a popular OS for containerization on-premise computers. 

Container engine
Container engines is a software program which creates containers based on container images. This acts as an intermediary agent between the containers and the OS. For example, container engines can manage multiple containers on the same OS by keeping them independent of underlying infrastructure.

Application and dependencies
Topmost layer is the application code and the other files it needs to run. This layer contains a light guest OS that gets installed over the host OS.

Containerization Vs Virtual Machines

Virtual Machine is a digital copy of the host machine's physical hardware and OS. Host machine has several VMs sharing its CPU, storage, and memory. Hypervisor is software that monitors VMs, allocating computing resources to all VMs regardless of whether the applications use them. 

Containerization is an improved concept of a VM. Containerization removes the OS layer from the self-contained environment instead of copying the hardware layer. This allows the application to run independently preventing resource waste with exact resources they need.

Containerization Vs Serverless Computing

Serverless computing is a cloud computing technology where the cloud vendor fully managed server infrastructure powering an application. This computing allows organizations to automatically scale computing resources according to the workload. 

Serverless computing allows instant deployment of applications and containers, on the other hand, are more portable giving developers complete control of the application’s environment.

Containerization Vs Cloud Native

Cloud native, a software development method builds, tests, and deploys an application in the cloud. Organizations build cloud-native applications since they are scalable, resilient, and flexible.

Cloud native applications require different technologies and approaches than monolithic applications. Containerization is one of the technologies which allows developers to build cloud-native applications, and also work with other cloud-native technologies such as service mesh, APIs.

Final Wrap Up

Containers present many benefits, and offer enterprises an attractive choice for software application development.  The usage of cloud Container-as-a-service(CaaS) such as AWS, EKS, AKS, Osiz Cloud Application and GKE is booming among enterprises today.  Container technology will be a foundational element of the enterprise software technology over the coming years. Companies should continue to invest in and utilize containerization in digital transformation journeys.

Get started with containerization on Osiz by seeing a free demo from our experts.