Docker: Top 7 Benefits of Containerization

Containerization has become an efficient way of boosting productivity in IT development processes. As the market keeps growing, people want explore the biggest Docker benefits and they want to know more about this valuable tool. The main question here is: why Docker? Essentially, companies and developers utilize Docker containers because it is a dramatic improvement for cloud development, and DevOps in general. If you wish to grasp the basics of Docker, then check out our Application Containerization: Docker Explained blog post.

Key Benefits of Docker Containers

The crucial word here is: agility. When we say ‘agility’ it basically refers to getting features and updates to customers or clients faster. Docker is an important tool when you’re creating the groundwork for any modern application. Primarily, it enables easy deployment to the cloud. Beyond that, Docker technology is also more controllable, more granular and is a microservices-based method focused on efficiency. Now, let’s take a deep dive by examining the seven major Docker benefits.

Consistent and Isolated Environment

Using containers developers can create predictable environments that are isolated from other apps. Regardless of where the app is deployed, everything remains consistent and this leads to massive productivity: less time debugging, and more time launching fresh features and functionality for users.

Cost-effectiveness with Fast Deployment

Docker-powered containers are known for decreasing deployment time to seconds. That’s an impressive feat by any standard. Traditionally, things like provisioning, getting the hardware up and running would take days or more. In addition, you faced massive overheads and extra work. When each process is put into a container, it can be shared with new apps. The process of deployment becomes swift and you are essentially ready to go.

Mobility - Ability to Run Anywhere

Docker images are free of environmental limitations, and that makes any deployment consistent, movable (portable), and scalable. Containers have the added benefit of running anywhere, providing it is targeted at the OS (Win, Mac OS, Linux, VMs, On-prem, in Public Cloud), which is a huge advantage for both development and deployment. The widespread popularity of the Docker image format for containers further helps. It has been adopted by leading cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. In addition, you have powerful orchestration systems such as Kubernetes, and products such as AWS ECS or Azure Container Instances are mighty useful in terms of mobility.

Repeatability and Automation

You are building code with repeatable infrastructure and config. This speeds up the development process tremendously. It must be pointed out that Docker images are often small. Consequently, you get fast delivery and, again, shorter deployment for new application containers. Another advantage is straightforward maintenance. When an application is containerized, it’s isolated from other apps running in the same system. In other words, apps don’t intermix and application maintenance significantly easier. It lends itself to being automated; the faster you repeat, the fewer mistakes you make, and the more you can focus on core value for a business or application.

Test, Roll Back and Deploy

As we said, Environments remain more consistent in Docker, from start to finish. Docker images are easily versioned, which makes them easy to roll back if you need to do so. If there is a problem with the current iteration of the image, just roll back to the older version. The whole process means you are creating the perfect environment for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). Docker containers are set to retain all configs and dependencies internally. Now, you have a fast and easy way of checking for discrepancies.

Flexibility

If you need to perform an upgrade during a product’s release cycle, you can easily make the necessary changes to Docker containers, test them, and roll out new containers. This sort of flexibility is another key advantage of using Docker. Docker really allows you to build, test, and release images that can be deployed across multiple servers. Even if a new security patch is available, the process remains the same. You can apply the patch, test it, and release it to production. Additionally, Docker allows you to start and stop services, or apps rapidly, which is especially useful within the cloud environment.

Collaboration, Modularity and Scaling

The Docker method of containerization allows you to segment an application so you can refresh, clean up, repair without even taking down the entire app. Furthermore, with Docker you can build an architecture for applications comprising of small processes that communicate with each other via APIs. From there, developers share and collaborate, solving any potential issues quickly. At this stage, the development cycle is completed and all issues are resolved, with no massive overhaul needed – this is extremely cost-effective and time-saving.

Date/Time

Date(s) - 01/01/1970
12:00 AM - 12:00 AM

Location

600 5th ave. NY, NY

Application Containerization: Docker Explained

If you are a modern-day developer or cloud engineer, searching for tools and solutions, chances are you already came across Docker. In the current technological landscape, the advantages of Docker go beyond development. Many are already embracing it as one of the key technologies, primarily in IT, but also in fin-tech, financial services. The tech is being hailed as a real game-changer when migrating to the cloud. Major industry companies are employing application containerization (specifically Docker), including Microsoft, Google, Facebook. In fact, Docker containers have been used more and more in different types of production environments. Time and again they’ve proved as one of the most efficient ways of establishing and implementing specific infrastructure requirements, easily and securely.

What is Docker?

Docker is commonly utilized as an open-source containerization platform. The platform helps developers package applications into containers — standardized executable components that merge application source code with relevant OS libraries and dependencies needed to run the code (regardless of environment). There is a reason why Docker has turned into one of the most sought-after open-source techs today. The shortest version would be that Docker basically allows you to build, ship, run an application, anywhere. The traditional process of running applications is to run them on Virtual Machines (or VMs). However, running them in containers instead of VMs is becoming significantly popular. So, a developer can package up an application with the essential dependencies, and then ship it all out as a single package.

Cloud-Agnostic Strategy, and the Power of Mobility

Docker lays the groundwork for a powerful cloud-agnostic strategy. This means you can switch cloud providers with no headaches (should the demand, pricing or performance change). The best part is setting up the multi-cloud approach, so you'll have workloads split between providers. In addition, with application containerization you'll also enhance cloud mobility. In other words, you are balancing resources and costs between public cloud services, and this gives you the power to adapt to any sudden changes in markets, or tech.

How Docker Helps Financial Services

Let’s say that a large banking and financial services company has separate instances for individual partners (clients). Traditionally, as a soon as a new partner needs on-boarding, a separate instance must be set up, followed by the necessary installation. Admittedly, quite a lot of financial services see it as a time-consuming process. When all the vital components for this new partner are moved to Docker containers, the situation improves dramatically. How so? Well, with Docker, when building a partner instance, all you need are the containers to be pulled from the repository, and that’s it: the application starts straight away. Application containerization also features time reduction factor, so, for example, deployment time decreases significantly. Upgrading each component is carried out swiftly and effortlessly. Docker containers also feature high portability and modularity. Utilizing Docker containerization, you can take down part of an application to modernize it and repair.

Top Application Containerization Service Providers

While docker helped simplify the developer experience. It’s important to emphasize that when we’re talking about application containerization, this is a relatively fresh approach in IT. Even so, it is a fast-growing trend. So, let’s highlight some of the leading application containerization services. Three are currently dominating the market: Docker Platform, Kubernetes Engine and Amazon Elastic Container Service.

Docker

Officially launched back in the year 2013, as an open-source technology under the name, Docker Engine. The docker container is actually a bundle of code that contains an application and its necessary elements. The container image is a lightweight package of executables that includes all of the code, runtime, system tools, libraries and configuration files needed to run an application. Container images become containers at runtime, isolating the software instance from its environment and ensuring that it performs uniformly regardless of differences between the development and staging environments.

The Google Kubernetes Engine

The Google Kubernetes Engine allows you to deploy, manage and scaling containerized applications utilizing the Google Cloud infrastructure. Kubernetes (also referred to as K8s) initially launched as an open-source containerization management system. Later it evolved and is packed with additional features and functionality with the Google Cloud Platform. Some of these features denote load-balancing for compute engine instances, automatic scaling of node instances, automatic software upgrades, auto-repair feature which helps to maintain node health and more.

Amazon's Elastic Container Service (or ECS)

ECS is another powerful container orchestration platform. It offers AWS customers the opportunity to run containerized applications, and naturally it supports Docker containers. The fully managed container orchestration service allows its users to implement API calls to launch or stop dockerized applications. ECS is also utilized within Amazon to power services such as Amazon SageMaker, AWS Batch, Amazon Lex, and Amazon.com’s recommendation engine. In addition, you can use it to access other AWS features such as AWS CloudTrail event logs, Amazon CloudWatch Events, IAM roles, and so on.

Results and Benefits

Any CD pipeline running in Docker containers can really move a lot faster. Some of the key areas can be provisioning build servers, testing, deployment automation and so on. With the increase of automation, you are straining infrastructure resources, and that’s where Docker comes in. It easily reduces these strains and ultimately the costs. This especially goes for larger development efforts. We’ve only just scratched the surface here. Docker has a huge number of benefits, such as being able to run additional workloads on the same hardware; plus it’s lightweight and fast. It is also a solid and cost-effective alternative to VMs, which means more computing capacity becomes available for your business operations. Stay tuned, for to learn more about the biggest benefits of Docker.

Date/Time

Date(s) - 01/01/1970
12:00 AM - 12:00 AM

Location

600 5th ave. NY, NY