Containerization is a very important application development factor, allowing enterprise company developers and engineers to eliminate the need for virtual machines. Using containers for an application project ensures a lightweight, faster, and more secure app.
Container images are certainly popular among developers, and enterprise company stakeholders. Why? Faster and more secure development equals more profits and greater market share among competitors.
Most industries utilizing container images are within IT services. However, there are a number of other industries using containerization like healthcare, finance, retail, and telecommunications.
Docker may come to mind when thinking about containerization, as well as JFrog Container Registry; and Kubernetes. For instance, 69 percent of organizations use Kubernetes to manage container files.
Having a container registry compliments Docker, Helm, and Kubernetes, giving enterprise companies insight into their Docker images and Kubernetes clusters.
Understanding containerization more can prove useful for all parties invested in application development and deployment via containers. Nearly every aspect of an enterprise company is impacted by digital transformations within DevOps, microservices, cloud, and legacy.
The following strategies can help alleviate some enterprise concerns when it comes to containers. Let’s dive in!
Containerization & DevOpsThere are generally two areas of an IT department in an enterprise company — Ops and development. The operations team and the development team once operated separately, but companies have learned that having DevOps teams in place, along with professionals certified in Cloud Computing Courses, is critical to project success.
Containerization has a major impact on DevOps, and the processes within an enterprise companies DevOps environment. Ensuring developers play a larger reaching role when it comes to operations is essential. Developers need to pass code to operations, but also be invested in how well that code will run down the road.
Prior to containers, developers would simply pass error heavy code and installation instructions. Containers changed this, thus revolutionizing the way application development and deployment is done. In a way, containerization synergized DevOps. To gain in-depth knowledge by signing up for the Intellipaat DevOps course to master various aspects of software development, operations, and deployment.
Developers do not just build application artefacts anymore. They create and pass a container image with built-in artifact and artefact running environment. This makes the container image an all-encompassing file, containing OS library, middleware, and more.
DevOps teams can be sure that the container will run the same way from development stage to production stage. This is what makes containerization powerful for enterprise companies.
Containerization & Cloud
Cloud is definitely a must in today’s high-level digital ecosystem. For enterprise companies, cloud strategy is a must-have in order to stay effective, efficient, productive, and competitive.
If cloud strategy is not in place, developers will find ways to make cloud a thing, which could be costly for your company. Cloud predictions for 2020 were spot on just two years ago.
In fact, 83 percent or more of an enterprise’s workload is stored on the cloud. Other cloud computing statistics include:
Over 80 percent of enterprise companies have a multi-cloud strategy
67 percent of enterprise infrastructure is cloud based
Platform-as-a-Service will increase by 56 percent
It is definitely hard to deny the wide-spread adoption of cloud computing. This makes cloud strategy essential for enterprise companies. And with that strategy comes containerization.
How? Well, cloud commonly serves up virtual machines. What eliminates the need for virtual machines? Containers. Containers are leaner than virtual machines, thus the ability to pack more containers within a virtual machine. Instead of one app per virtual machine, you get more development bang for your buck.
However, navigating the growing number of cloud vendors can be tricky for enterprise companies. Cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and others all provide public cloud services for companies.
This is great, but as a company, you want to ensure you are not backing yourself into a corner when it comes to your cloud strategy. Each public cloud service has unique protocols and environments to tend to. You want to steer clear of being vendor specific.
This is why portability is critical to app development utilizing containers. With containerization within your development environment, your DevOps team can create and run applications that will run across a variety of systems. This eliminates the need to be cloud vendor specific.
Containerization & Microservices
Microservices had a boost in 2018. Studies a few years ago found that over 60 percent of enterprises were adopting microservices of some kind, even cloud microservices. The adoption continues today with nearly 30 percent of software developers saying their companies are migrating to microservices.
Microservices certainly have value, since developers can break down apps into bite-size services with each smaller service having its own specific job. The microservices are also all written in multiple programming languages managed by a team that can make quick changes and updates.
Easy, lean, and fast development processes you see microservices providing are supported by containerization. Containers are the core of these microservices, since they too are easy to create and portable. In many ways, containers and microservices are tethered in today’s software development environment.
Why do you need containers for microservices? Microservices do serve up simplicity. However, this simplicity can also bring about complexity in the development process. To deploy and orchestrate microservices effectively, containers are needed to reduce those complexities.
For instance, containers can support microservices by:
- Ensuring flexibility, allowing developers to deploy on any infrastructure
- Implementing design patterns in a non-specific programming language
- Keeping code non-complex
This makes it essential to choose the right container platform when it comes to running microservices within your enterprise company. There are plenty of choices out there. However, you need to consider that many of the choices can back you into a corner, leaving you with very vendor specific processes.
Wrapping Up . . .
Containerization for enterprise companies really comes down to three major strategies: DevOps, Cloud, and Microservices. Having the ability to implement all three of these strategies in some way can lead to even more successful software and application development. What is your future container strategy?