The Rise of Cloud Containers: Kubernetes, Docker, and Beyond
The Rise of Cloud Containers: Kubernetes, Docker, and Beyond
Blog Article
Businesses today are feeling pressure to build, test, and deploy applications faster and more efficiently than ever before in today’s fast paced digital world. This shift towards more agility has led to a groundbreaking technology: cloud containers, and tools such as Docker and Kubernetes are at the helm of this revolution and fundamentally changed how developers build and scale applications across the digital world.
Containers, like Docker, are portable, and lightweight, and allow you to package everything you need to run a piece of software: code, runtime, libraries, and system tools. With containers, the software runs with the same environment on any computer regardless of the host type or architecture. While traditional virtual machines bundle an entire OS alongside the application, containers share the OS of the host.
Containers are faster and easier to manage, because they're more efficient than virtual machines--there is no need to deploy an entirely separate OS. Docker was one of the first tools to make containerization popular, allowing software developers to containerize their applications using a few simple commands.
As the world started to utilize containers more and more, so was the importance of orchestration, especially in complex cloud environments that were running hundreds and thousands of containers. This is where Kubernetes came onto the scene.
Kubernetes was an open-source platform developed by Google for orchestrating containers. Kubernetes automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. In addition, Kubernetes helps with high availability, failure handling, and effectively delivers software in a practical, reliable way at scale.
In addition to Docker and Kubernetes, there is a container ecosystem that continues to grow. A number of other tools are emerging like Podman, CRI-O and containerd that are providing other options or substitutes for container tooling to help with potentially better security and more specialized features. Service meshes tools like Istio and Linkerd, or Helm for Kubernetes application management, are further driving the advancement of container orchestration and service management.
Cloud providers have also adopted containers in full. Managed container offerings, such as AWS Fargate, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and many others, have made it even easier for teams of all sizes to take advantage of the overhead reduction from managing infrastructure with containers.
The emergence of cloud containers represents a radical change in nuance, and the way that modern applications are developed and deployed. It's about flexibility, speed and reliability. Containers are leading to a better and more intelligent cloud-native world that allows for building microservices, scaling globally, or automating your infrastructure.
As organizations and businesses continue to put digital transformation first, the pace of uptake for container technologies will only accelerate, so it is an exciting opportunity to innovate in the cloud.