In the world of IT Cloud Container remains a buzzword, especially in terms of elements that include security, monitoring, storage, networking, and container orchestration.

Gartner predicted that by 2022, over 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production.  Somehow it becomes true as today's world's top IT companies, including Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, all use cloud containers due to its cloud hosting based, serverless, lightweight, highly scalable, and agile features.

The question is when everything is going smooth with Virtualization then what is the need for Containerization?

Generally, almost all enterprises use the public or private cloud environment with instances running VMs with scalability and load-balancing capabilities to represent their compute layer. However, virtualization has some challenges that made these environments inefficient. These include

  - Inconsistency in the environment 

  - Dependency on the operating system

  - Isolation level 

  - Compute consumption granularity 

  - Patching images in production-grade environments 

There is only one way to solve these virtualization issues and that is containerization.

Find out what containers are, why cloud containers are becoming preferred over virtual machines, and how they work.

Cloud Containerization: Everything you need to know

What is a Container?

Just like massive shipping containers that migrate all kinds of goods easily, similarly software containers make the migration of applications and services easy. 

The container has everything that is required to run an application that including system tools, runtime, code, and system libraries. It makes the computing environment executable for defined parameters and can run a program, a workload, or a specific task.

Cloud Containers are hosted in an online environment. Users can access them from anywhere. However, application processes in cloud-based containers remain separate from cloud infrastructure.

What is Cloud Containerization?

Containerization has become popular as an alternative to virtualization in software development. Cloud Containerization is the process of developing software applications for containers. 

A typical application container consists of everything that an app needs to run and all are encapsulated in a container. It includes:

  - The application code

  - Configuration files

  - Software dependencies

  - Libraries

  - Environment variables

What are the main benefits of containerization?

Containerization is highly beneficial for developers as well as for businesses because of various reasons. The container technology uses the same method for several platforms to develop, test, deploy, scale, re-build, and destroy applications.

Advantages of containerization include:

 

Less System resources

Containers need fewer system resources than virtual machines as they do not bind operating system images to each application they store.

Highly Interoperable 

Containerization is highly interoperable as containerized apps use the host Operating system 

Optimized resource usage 

Containerization uses optimized resources as container computing allows similar apps to share libraries and binary files.

No hardware-level or implementation worries 

With containerization, you are free from hardware-level or implementation issues since containers are infrastructure-independent.

Better portability 

The portability of a Cloud container is best because it can migrate and deploy containers anywhere smoothly.

Easy scaling and development 

It also offers simple scaling and development because this technology allows gradual expansion and parallel testing of apps.

Speed

Containers share the machine’s operating system (OS) kernel and are not bogged down with this extra overhead. It not only drives higher server efficiencies but also decreases server and licensing costs while speeding up start times as there is no operating system to boot.

Efficiency

In containerized environments the running Virtualization software shares the operating system kernel of the machine. Also, it can share application layers across containers. 

Thus, containers are inherently smaller in capacity than a VM and need less start-up time, allowing far more containers to run on the same compute capacity as a single VM. This offers higher efficiency of the server, reducing server and licensing costs.

Ease of management

The platform of container orchestration automates the scaling, installation, and management of containerized workloads and services. This platform easily manages the tasks such as rolling out new versions of apps, scaling containerized apps, and providing logging, monitoring and debugging, among other functions. The most popular container orchestration system is Kubernetes.

Security

It helps in isolating the applications. Containers inherently prevent the invasion of malicious code from affecting other containers or the host system. 

 

Containers vs Virtual Machines – What’s the Difference?

Containers and Virtual machines may appear similar, but their functionalities are different in many ways.

Comparison between Container Vs Virtual Machine
	Virtual Machine (VM)	Container
Operating System (OS) Kernel	Each VM has its own OS Kernel	Shares the host’s OS Kernel
Boot Time	Up to a few minutes	A few seconds
Libraries	Independent for each app	Can be shared
Size	1-2 GBs	A few MBs
Binaries and Configuration Files	Independent for each app	Can be shared

 

Along with above-mentioned differences, virtual machines use hypervisors that hitch them directly to the server hardware, on contrary, containers can sit on the host’s OS directly. 

Applications in a virtual machine need a Guest OS per app for execution whereas containers can directly run the applications on the host OS.

In a nutshell,

Virtualization removes the requirement of a single application for an entire server. Additionally, containerization removes the requirement of each application for an entire operating system. 

After reading the above blog, you must understand that containerization technology is rich in features that include agility, portability, security, ease of management, and efficiency. 

However, Virtualization and containerization both have their own strong and weak points and many companies need both containers and VMs. Thus, the two can complement each other rather than compete.