Tuesday, December 7, 2021

The Concept of Containerization for Cloud-Native Apps: Definition and Benefits

Global IT organizations are now adopting containers to develop and deploy their workflows. Containers provide businesses with a way to automate their deployment of modern applications to scale up the business. As a result, the IT sector has been under extreme pressure to increase agility and fasten their delivery of new functionality to their business line.


The deployment of new or enhanced application code at the frequency and immediacy demanded digital transformation to evolve at a rapid pace. However, it’s not that simple as it sounds.

Containerization has become a popular term in a cloud computing environment. In this blog, our 
enterprise app development company has explained why and how it helps modernize the legacy systems of organizations and create new, scalable cloud-native apps.


Overview


Organizations, large or small use cloud (public/private) with their compute layer represented by instances running virtual machines with scalability and load-balancing capabilities. However, this virtualization drives a lot of challenges such as:

  • Environment inconsistency – Deployment of applications/packages to virtual machine system.
  • OS dependency – Deployed apps can run only on compatible OS.
  • Isolation level – Inability to provide instant Sandbox above OS level.
  • Compute consumption granularity – Inability to deploy multiple replicated apps and load balance on application layer within the single machine (not OS layer).
  • Patching of images (production-grade environments) – blue, green. and canary deployments are not flexible on a cluster level with complex governing across multiple regions.

Now, to resolve these virtualization challenges, containerization was introduced to the cloud-native environment.


What is Containerization in Cloud Computing?


In simple words, Containerization refers to the evolution of virtualization. It is more granular and flexible while focusing on breaking down the operating system into small parts to make it perform efficiently. Additionally, containerization provides a way of packing applications in a portable, software-defined space.


The concept of application containerization is helping mobile app development companies modernize their legacy applications while creating new, scalable cloud-native applications. This concept has been significant and accelerating too. The use of containerization has made most enterprises ready to develop cloud-native applications. And many are in the process of decomposing their existing monoliths to gain benefits from this architecture. But what are the benefits of implementing containerization?


Benefits of Containerization  


Here is a list of benefits that accelerated the concept of containerization in a cloud-native environment.


  • Low cost on infrastructure operations – There are usually many containers running on a single VM which gets resolved with containerization.
  • Solution scalability on the microservice/function level – Enterprises can no longer scale instances/VMs.
  • Enhanced security – The entire application isolation makes it possible to set each application’s major process in separate containers to improve its security.
  • Quick replication of microservices using replicas and deployment sets.
  • Flexible routing of services that are natively supported by various containerization platforms.
  • Deployment is possible everywhere, including hybrid environments.
  • Extended portability between clouds and on-premises locations.
  • OS independent. Containerization don’t need any OS to function; just the container engine to deploy on a host OS.
  • Quick deployment with hydration of new containers and faster termination of old containers within the same environment.
  • Lightweight – Without an OS, containers are lightweight and less demanding on server resource usage.
  • Faster ready to compute. The Containers can start and stop within seconds in comparison to VMs.

  • Summary

The concept of containerization drives a lot of benefits to large and small businesses. However, migrating your applications demands a lot of manual work and training for the entire team. Hire mobile app developers who can extend their support on this journey.


This blog gives you a few insights into varied reasons why organizations are shifting to contained-based stacks. To learn more about the major driving factors of this new transformation in serverless architecture and microservices, get in touch with our cloud experts today.

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