As companies embrace the cloud and use microservices
architectures and DevOps to increase app development
speed, they’re also adopting other technologies to help.
That includes containers.
Containers package apps and services in an operating
system (OS)-level virtualization image, offering efficiency
and speed. They isolate apps’ execution environments from
each other but share the underlying OS kernel. A single OS
instance is dynamically divided among one or more isolated
containers. Each has a unique writable file system and
resource quota.
While the cloud isn’t required for using containers,
containers can make cloud-based applications easier and
faster to deploy.
The low overhead of creating and destroying containers,
combined with the high packing density in a single virtual
machine (VM), makes them ideal for deploying individual
microservices — a key component in cloud-native app
development.