Lionel Sujay Vailshery
Research expert covering cloud computing and emerging tech industries
Container technology - statistics & facts
Computer container technology, also known as containers, is very much like a shipping container, a standardized box that can hold various goods. In technology, the container holds codes, libraries, and the settings needed to run a specific piece of software. In other words, it is a form of operating system virtualization that isolates applications from other processes so it can run in different environments.
Container technology today is primarily associated with Docker and Kubernetes but has been around since at least 2008. In fact, a strong focus on cloud native and accelerating software development has led to the widespread adoption of container technology by developers. Accordingly, the major public cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud offer container registries on their platforms to help manage container workloads.
How does container technology work?
In the traditional deployment scenario, software has dependencies and libraries that require specific hardware and OS to run properly. If these requirements are not met, incompatibilities arise. Containers solve this issue as they are isolated with their entire runtime environment, which includes configuration files, dependencies, libraries, and binaries. In other words, containers encompass all the files necessary to run the application as an isolated package. For this reason, they can easily be migrated across environments as a unit and thereby avoid underlying hardware and OS differences.
Technical and organizational advantages of containers
Container adoption is pervasive because they simplify the build process by reducing security risks, speeding up deployments, and lessening complexity. Such a microservice architecture breaks down application components into small parts and assigns them to multidisciplinary teams, which can then operate separately. This method reduces time to market for code, which is of paramount importance for organizations, as they seek to achieve digital innovation which is enabled by traditional workload modernization. Further, organizations help organizations make applications scalable and portable as hybrid and multi cloud becomes the norm.
Kubernetes is a leading container orchestration system
Since almost half of the organizations worldwide have already adopted cloud-native storage, it is not surprising that the open-source platform has emerged as a standard for container management and orchestration. Kubernetes, also known as K8s, was originally developed by Google. It groups containers for easy management into logical units. Although the platform supports users in cluster management and automation, challenges remain. Among these are the complexity and security associated with containers, but also cultural changes associated with development.
