How businesses can scale their containerized applications efficiently?

Containerization is emerging as a rapidly developing technology that offers packaging mechanism where applications are extracted from their actual operating environments. Containerized applications involve microservices that enable efficiency but create challenges in isolating root causes when issues arise. Application containerization provides a less resource-intensive alternative to running an application on a virtual machine. This is majorly because containers share computational resources and memory without the need for a full operating system to underpin each application.

In Forrester Consulting's 2020 Container Adoption & Usage in the Enterprise study, 65% of tech leaders reported to turn to third-party platforms for container management instead of relying on internal expertise. Rather than virtualizing the hardware stack through the virtual machines approach, containers virtualize at the operating system level, with multiple containers running over the OS kernel directly. It delineates that containers are far lighter, they share the OS kernel, start much faster, and use a fraction of the memory compared to booting an entire OS.

Benefits of Moving Applications to Containers

Shifting to containers from virtual machines allows developers to deliver changes in a fraction of the time. Once an application moves to containers, it becomes portable. Moving IT systems to containers is described as a cloud migration strategy.

Currently, a majority of organizations are operating a significant part of their IT estate on virtual machines. While a virtual machine involves a complete operating system, a container, in contrast, comprises most of the operating system capabilities from the host operating system on the machine. Prior to the advent of container technology, applications were deployed to each environment by updating the existing virtual machines. An environment-specific deployment script ran a set of commands to copy the latest version of the application to a shared file system, and then updated each virtual machine with the new version. The deployment was then slow and frequently failed owing to transient timeout errors during the update process.

As application containerization is considered as an opportunity for modernization, containerized services provide potential benefits. These include agility and productivity; fine-grained resilience; scalability and infrastructure optimization; operational consistency; and component portability.

Scaling Containerized Applications with Container Orchestration

Container orchestration refers to the automation of scheduling, deployment, networking, scaling, health monitoring, and management of containers. Already, companies like Facebook, Google, IBM and others are capitalizing on container orchestration platforms. Docker is one of the leading containerization platforms packaging a business's application and all its dependencies together.

Some common Docker command lines include pull an image or a repository from a local registry, private registry or Docker Hub; create a container from an image; start one or more stopped containers; and stop one or more running containers. These commands help in managing a small number of containers on a few hosts, but they fall short of automating the full lifecycle of complex deployments on multiple hosts. Using a container orchestration platform delivers potential benefits such as easy scaling of applications and infrastructure; service discovery and container networking; improved governance and security controls; container health monitoring; load balancing of containers evenly among hosts; optimal resource allocation; and container lifecycle management.