One of the most used and known technologies of the last few years concerning the Digital Transformation process, is the Container one. The reason of its success is its digital Revolution that takes lots of companies to become real Software Houses, to keep them competitive in the market. So, there are more and more social, mobile and web-scale applications, requiring continuous updates and appropriate tools.
First of all: What is a Container, and which are the benefits for companies using this technology? Let me answer with this short video:
In this trend, Docker created an open source platform that automates the application deployment inside Containers, providing an additional abstract thanks to the operating system level virtualization. Docker uses the isolation functionality of the Linux kernel resources, like cgroups and namespaces, allowing independent containers to coexist into the same instance, avoiding the virtual machine installation and maintenance.
Using this solution, containers are simpler to be used and easily available to developers.
Docker technology is day by day more used all over the world and the benefits it takes are constantly increasing. Let’s see the main reasons why Docker Containers became so appreciated.
Container technology allows to simplify the development of every application without being worried about the runtime environment configuration, because of the possibility to manage every application inside a single distributable and configurable component, with only one command line.
Docker is earning the developers trust because it ensures its functioning in every environment: it doesn’t matter the vehicle, it perfectly works everywhere.
One of the main Docker’s benefits is its portability. That’s why also Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Compute Platform (GCP) decided to adopt it: containers can be ran into an Amazon EC2 or Google Compute Engine instance, into a Rackspace or VirtualBox server, provided that the Docker Host is supported by the operating system. So, a container ran into an Amazon EC2 instance can be taken into any environment, without losing its consistency and functionality, ensuring a high abstraction level of the infrastructure. After the recent release, Docker works perfectly also with other IaaS providers like Microsoft Azure and OpenStack and it can be used also with Puppet and Ansible.
Docker ensures the consistency between more development and release cycles, standardizing the environments and working as a Git repository; this solution allows to save the Docker image changes and manage them through the management control. If the update process fails, Docker makes a rollback to a previews version in few minutes, much faster than VM backup processes or images creation.
Docker ensures applications and resources to be isolated because every container possess isolated resources from those of the other. This functionality helps removing applications in a cleaner way, because each application runs inside its own container. For example, if an application is not needed anymore, it’s enough to delete its container being sure that no temporary files will be released inside the operating system.
Concerning the security aspect, the applications on containers are completely separated from each other, to ensure the full control on the management: a Docker container cannot see the running processes inside another container. This function is very important for what concerns the security, because even if an application is hacked, it doesn’t influence the applications on the other Docker containers.
Because of its benefits, Docker Container solution is continuously spreading and the biggest companies from all over the world (IBM, Google and Mirantis) are adopting it as the main solution. According to a 2018 survey about the container implementation, more than 50% of companies are available to invest + 500.000 $ to implement this technology (5% in 2016 and 32% in 2017).
Docker EE (Enterprise Edition) helps companies to work faster through its Docker-ready platforms. This is an end to end integrated platform to easily manage applications according to the agile methodology. It is a real integration tool making developers and operations work together for the software creation and development through its whole lifecycle. Docker EE ensures security, policy and control during the applications lifecycle, without sacrificing their agility and portability. The solution can be integrated with every business – doesn’t matter if it is based on on-premise, VCP models, on open API or closed interfaces – it possesses flexibility enough to support many workloads.
Docker Container world is just one of many aspects that can be associated to the DevOps Methodology implementation. If you want to learn more about it, download our FREE GUIDE