Skip to main content

Docker Container-based Custom Application Management - what business leaders should know

Docker Containers Business Leaders Need to Know

Docker Containers have become an essential element in modern, high-performance IT operations practices — particularly in the cloud computing era. This article defines what containers are and why they are important to your business, whether you are responsible for just managing a single server or running IT operations at scale.

Docker Containers Background
IT operations are responsible for managing and maintaining an efficient and reliable computing infrastructure that supports the range of computing tasks performed by a business. These tasks are facilitated through enterprise resource planning applications that support Human Resources, Finance, Customer Relationship Management, Project Management, Operations Management and Workflow, Logistics, Reporting and Analytics, and more. While these applications differ in function all share a common dependence on efficient, reliable, and responsive computing resources. These resources include an operating system, processor, RAM, storage and networking elements. Historically, these individual elements were organized and managed as physical server units, then virtual machines with the advent of virtualization technology.
Virtual Machines improved overall computing resources and IT operations efficiency through increased sharing of physical hosts and host files and libraries. This reduction in physical servers and increased utilization of host files and libraries led to a reduction in Capital and Operations Expenditure, and improvements in Developer and Customer Experience. 
Containers extend the efficiency trajectory of Virtual machines by allowing apps to run in a dramatically simplified and light-weight environment compared to physical servers and virtual machines. Containers disassociate dedicated application dependencies from shareable OS elements. These shareable elements are abstracted and packaged as single-instance, shareable resources that further improve resource utilization. 

Containers and Docker

Containers were introduced as an extension of the Linux Operating System in 2001. They are an evolution and formalization of namespace isolation and resource governance techniques used in pre-Linux Operating Systems such as Solaris Zones, Unix chroot and BSD Jails. The Docker Container specification presented a common packaging model, test and deployment model that dramatically simplified containerization and application deployment on Linux hosts. The specification was realized as Docker images that contained shared host and VM files and libraries. This evolution led to further improvement in computing resource utilization — maximizing resource sharing by eliminating VM-related overhead — and significant improvement in IT operations and application management. The result is further improvement in Capital Expenditure, Operations Expenditure, and Customer Experience. 
The benefits of Docker Containers were introduced to Windows hosting environments with Windows Server 2016. To support this initiative, Microsoft established a partnership with Docker to extend the Docker API and toolset to support containers operating on Windows Server hosts. The Microsoft extensions permit the same Docker client to manage both Linux and Windows Server containers — extending Docker utility for Windows Server while preserving the DevOps efficiencies and user experience made possible by Docker. This initiative by Microsoft created a true win-win scenario for all parties.

Why Docker Containers are Important

Docker Containers are important for small and large IT operations. To understand this, let’s review the DevOps benefits of Docker-based containers:
  1. Application performance improvements. This is enabled through the sharing a single Operating System kernel across multiple containers. The result is more efficient and granular application packaging, which in fast container startup and because the startup package is smaller and OS components are excluded from the container startup process. 
  2. Faster Provisioning. Containers are dramatically faster to provide because they are significantly lighter-weight to build and define versus Virtual Machine images, and they are provisioned via software on pre-provisioned infrastructure. 
  3. Efficient Resource Utilization. Containers are also more efficient at resource utilization than Virtual Machines with siloed OSs and OS-based resources.
  4. Simple, high availability. This is because the containers can run on the different underlying hardware. If one host goes down, traffic can be re-routed from the Edge to live application containers running elsewhere.
  5. Smooth scaling. Containers enable smooth scaling without downtime or architectural changes. Scaling is difficult with VM-centric hosting which requires rebooting, and often rearchitecting, to resize.
  6. Configuration consistency. Every container can be exactly the same. The hosting platform is a large, resource sharing matrix. Containers are provisioned automatically on identical infrastructure managed via consistent, automated tools that minimizes server sync issues.
These are direct benefits if you are responsible for managing a large IT operation. You and your DevOps team can experience them in your day to day operations. However, these benefits also apply if you are responsible for administering a single server or even a single website. This is because best of breed hosting providers such as Azure or AWS (a) have platform economics that produces lower costs for comparable, small-to-large scale server deployments, and (b) have largely adopted containers — so by utilizing one of them you indirectly experience these benefits.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Top 10 Mobile app development Management Tools

Top 10 Mobile app development Frameworks  The mobile app development has been one of the hottest topics in technology for quite some time now. There are many apps that are being developed by companies with all kinds of varied purposes. These include gaming, gaming, entertainment, productivity, research, and more. The increasing demand for different types of apps has led to an increase in the number of app developers. The problem is that it is difficult to find the best mobile app development, management tools to help them create all these apps. Mobile applications are software that is created to run on devices such as smartphones, tablets, or watches to perform various tasks. there are types various mobile applications such as email applications, gaming, application health applications, travel applications, banking applications, etc. These applications can be easily downloaded in applications distributed platforms such as the Apple app store or Google Play store. Mobile Application...

The Internet of Things It Cover All Business Web Services

The Source IoT, It will describe the market around the Internet of Things (IoT), the technology used to build these kinds of devices, how they communicate, how they store data, web services, cloud computing contributes to the growth of the internet of things from the mere definition to reality. ... Web service uses XML for data representation and data transportation between layers. Divided into four modules, we will learn by doing. We will start with simple examples and integrate the techniques we learn into a class project in which we design and build an actual out system. Internet of  Things Graph, a service that connects different devices and cloud services, such as linking humidity sensors to sprinklers to weather data services to create agricultural applications, Industrial apps through a visual drag-and-drop interface.  Internet of Things Site Wise to monitor operations across facilities, quickly compute common industry performance metrics, build applications t...

Best CSS frameworks for the Responsive site

CSS frameworks for the Responsive Website    One of the most popular and used web design tools is CSS, which powers the design and layout of a website. CSS frameworks are an important resource for web developers as they can be used to make designing websites easier. The five best CSS frameworks for 2022 are Bootliquor, The Grid System, UIkit, Foundation, and SemanticUI. Bootliquor: Bootliquor is a lightweight framework that provides tools to create responsive grid layouts and RTL language support for Arabic and Hebrew languages. The Grid System: This framework focuses on making it easier to design websites with templates that can be easily rearranged with drag-and-drop functionality. UIkit: Uikit is another responsive grid system that offers hundreds of pre-made templates as well as the ability One of the best ways to learn web development is to use a framework. Frameworks make it easy for developers to create and build websites and templates without writing every line of code...