Why do we use containers?

Return of investment and cost savings

The first benefits in container use is the ROI.

The more a solution's costs can be cut, the more benefits grow, and the solution is in improving

In that sense, the containers help easing this kind of saving by reducing infrastructure costs, because running the same application requires fewer resources.

In fact, using containers, we can save both in server costs and in employees needed to maintain those, because this technology allows for smaller, more effective engineering teams.

Standardization and Efficiency

Containers guarantee coherence in multiple environment and release cycles. One of the main advantages of containering is standardization, because the development, building, test and production environments it provides are repeatable. Service infrastructure standardization throughout the whole process allows each team member to work in a production-like environment. By doing this, engineers are more fitted to efficiently analyse and correct errors in the application.

This reduces the amount of time that is lost in flaws and increases the available time to develop features.

Containers allows performing changes in images and controlling their versioning, e.g., if a component update breaks a whole environment, it is easy to go back to a previous version of its .odo image. This process can be tested in a few minutes.

Containers allow building an image, then using that image in each step of the implementation process. A great advantage of this is the ability to discriminate non-dependant steps to run these in parallel. Time from built to production can then speed up remarkably.

Compatibility and Maintainability

End with the "it works in my machine" problem for good! One advantage that all the team will enjoy is parity.

Parity, in container terms, means that images run the same no matter in what server or laptop.

For the developers, this means less time used to set up environments, to debug environment-specific problems, and a more portable, easier-to-set-up code base. Parity also means that the production infrastructure is more trustable and easier to maintain.

Simplicity and Quicker Configurations

A key benefit is the way containers simplify stuff. Users can take their own configuration, include it in the code and deploy it without any problem. As a wide range of environments can be used, infrastructure requirements are no longer linked to the application environment.

Quick Deployment

Containers help by reducing deployment time. This is because one container is created for each process, instead of booting up an operating system.

Continuous Deployment and Tests

Containers guarantee the environment's consistency from development to production. Containers are configured to internally keep all the configurations and dependencies. Thus, the same container can be used from development to production, ensuring no discrepancy or manual intervention.

Multi-Cloud Platform

This may well be one of the containers' main advantages. In later years, every main provider of cloud computing, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Compute Platform (GCP), have adopted Docker availability and added individual support. Coupled containers can run within an Amazon EC2 instance, a Google Compute Engine instance, a Rackspace server or VirtualBox, as long as the host operating system is compatible with Docker. If this is the case, a container running in Amazon EC2 can be easily ported to a different environment.

Docker also works very well with other providers such as Microsoft Azure and OpenStack, and can be used with different configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, etc.

Isolation

Containers guarantee that their application and resources are isolated and segregated, ensuring that each container has its own resources, which are isolated from other containers. You can have several containers for separate tools running completely different stacks.

This helps removing applications, because each application runs in its own container. If you no longer need an application, you can simply remove its container. No temporary or configuration file will remain in your host operating system.

Beyond all these advantages, containers also ensure that each application uses only the resources it has been assigned. A specific application will not use all the available resources, which would normally lead to a lower performance or to full inactivity time for the other applications.

Security

The last advantage of using containers is in security. Applications are guaranteed to run in containers, completely segregated and isolated from each other, providing you with a total control on the traffic flow and management. No container can see the processes running in other container. Architecture-wise, each container receives its own set of resources, going from processing to network stacks.