Speed. Flexibility. Scalability. Maintainability. Resiliency. If these are some of the most desirable attributes in your organization cloud environment, you should be using containers if you aren't already. Every cloud vendor already has cloud container capabilities, you just need to understand how to use them.
A container is a standard unit of software that packages code in order to make an application run more quickly across computing environments. These containers can be moved around easily, providing flexibility and mobility within the cloud, especially when combining them with virtualized, scaled hardware. This allows you to spin up your container software in microseconds instead of minutes. The container doesn't even need to understand the operating system, just the runtime, boosting scalability in and out of the cloud.
Containers are designed to be or do a small, specific task. For instance, a large application might include going to a database and getting information, getting input from a user, or doing some analysis - all steps that in a traditional application end up being sequential. But in a container framework, since they're all designed for different things, so they're broken up to act independently.
Originally containers were designed to be stateless, meaning when code is executed, it simply gives you the results. It does not save or store information about the transaction, but merely provides an output to your input. With stateful containers, you can store information about a service and what it did. Of course this means containers must have external storage to store this information, which is where Compass comes in. Compass backs up and stores metadata about a transaction. In a stateless transaction there may be very little to protect or backup, but most apps eventually become stateful in some form, and even containers at rest must be backed up, creating a need for persistent storage.
Container infrastructures can be as varied as the environments running them, but there are currently four main models of physical infrastructure:
This model allows you to bring up another container service across existing and running infrastructure more quickly, and allows you to move the support of developmental organization away from the operations of infrastructure and operating systems meaning developers don't have to tie so closely to the guest/host operating system, and can manage infrastructure through code more easily.
In virtual real estate, it's all about location, location, location. While these models may seem similar at first glance, there are distinct differences in where virtualization takes place. In the model on the left (below), physical hardware is virtualized at the hypervisor level to each guest operating system. The guest operating systems are considered "heavy," and the two stacks look similar in weight.
In the model on the right, the host operating system itself is virtualized for each container. The virtualization location dramatically enhances the speed across your environment, assisted at an even more granular level by microservices.
A common misconception is that microservices are equivalent to Containers, but they're not.
Let's look at containers running on Docker. Typically an app is running in a container, but with microservices, little pieces of an app can sit at different levels of infrastructure within your environment. You may have a database you're considering that provides a service to your organization. Maybe this database supports ten applications. You can build each piece as a service with a basic function that is small enough to be used by multiple applications. Pull together these smaller functions to create a new application, and that in a nutshell is microservices architecture, a development approach to applications.
Containers combined with microservices provides technical flexibility, rapid deployment, resiliency, maintainability, and reusability across multiple environments. Leveraging these tools can make your data easier to manipulate and infinitely more manageable.