Why enterprises are opting for containerization

As VMworld 2019 comes around, much of the focus is now on containerization.

Why all the buzz? Why are enterprises looking towards containers? From my perspective as a company that has helped build several innovative data storage, cloud, and virtualization products, it’s clear that containers seem to offer a great combination of benefits for enterprises. Here’s a view I’ve built up based on what I’ve read.

Organizations are moving more business-critical applications and workloads to the cloud. But coupled with that is the need for them to embrace the multi-cloud to make the best use of the specific benefits offered by each cloud service provider. This often means looking to create a unified view for an application or a workload that may, in actual fact, be distributed across multiple clouds and multiple environments. This need to unify has become a key driver for the use of containers.

Containerization has been one of the key enablers of the trend of microservices-based architecture. Of course, the process of containerization involves isolating software code and bundling it along with their dependencies to run on any infrastructure. Containerization is evolving rapidly due to its many benefits for enterprises, the practice of software development and its infrastructure.

Containerization now allows faster deployment of applications and in a secured manner. It is easy to transfer and run an application from one architecture to another, unlike conventional methods which may run into errors and bugs. For instance, an application running on a Windows operating system can be moved to a Linux operating system by encapsulating the dependencies, libraries and configuration files with it. This is stand-alone and is not dependent on its host OS, thus making it portable to run on any platform.

Of course, another similar technology that has become a staple is Virtualization. Virtualization allows running multiple operating systems and applications at the same time on a single server. For instance, virtualization makes it possible to run multiple versions of Linux with different applications on the same physical server. The operating system along with the libraries and dependencies are bundled as a VM(Virtual Machine) and spun off in the physical server. The running of multiple Virtual Machines on a single physical server result in operational, energy, and capital cost savings.

So, where do they come together and where do they diverge?

Advantages of containerization

Multiple containers can be run on top of an OS kernel by abstracting the operating system. This makes containers more portable, lightweight, and faster. They also use very little memory as compared to the amount of memory needed for booting an entire operating system. Containers bundle resources in a single instance. This helps save costs. In his book, “The Box - How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger”, Marc Levinson explains how the introduction of shipping containers had a great impact on the global economy. Before the advent of shipping containers, shipping one ton of loose cargo took $6. But with shipping containers, cargo could be stacked up and made more manageable. The shipping cost went down to 16 cents per ton, thereby rendering cost savings of 97%. Similarly, (Docker) containerization is faster and cuts costs.

Containerization vs Virtualization

Utilization of resources

Virtualization is a replication of the operating system with binaries, drivers, and the actual application. The hypervisor which hosts the operating system controls the entire physical hardware. This method results in some wastage of server memory. On the other hand, containers hold only the application and the dependencies, which reduces the wastage of resources. Also, containerization allows easy updates since changes can be made to the servers directly, unlike in Virtual Machine’s, where each Virtual Machine has to been updated individually.

Scalability

Containerization allows scalability by eliminating the need for multiple servers, unlike virtual machines. Containers allow removing or adding resources instantly and on the go. Virtual machines need to be booted every time an update is made. Adding new containers can be made effortlessly. It is only a matter of a few seconds to add a new container, while it may take more time to provision a virtual machine.

Cloud-Native Architecture

With containerization, it is now possible to pay more attention to development rather than worry about server memory, resource constrictions, provisioning complications, and other performance-related issues. Thus, the deployment of containers creates a development environment similar to cloud-based development. In virtualization, even though the physical hardware is managed by the hypervisor, any changes need to be implemented on individual Virtual Machines.

Speed

Virtual Machines are often larger and take up more time to get up and running. Containers, on the other hand, are smaller in size, 1/10th or 1/100th the size of a virtual machine and so initialize within seconds. Even from the performance perspective, containers perform seamlessly during extreme workloads and are quicker in implementing policy-based microservices.

Most enterprises that move to microservices-based architecture would certainly find containers suitable. Containers offer a seamless framework to run applications. The container’s ability to deploy in isolation with their dependencies in the same operating system instance will help achieve better server usage. And if enterprises run their microservice applications on cloud environments, this will greatly cut capital costs.

Overall, containerization help enterprise to run multiple applications on a single physical hardware or run the same application on multiple operating systems simultaneously. Businesses that thrive in a fast-paced environment can benefit from transitioning to a container-based architecture because of them being portable and ‘lightweight’.

It’s clear that containers are here to stay. Companies with multiple applications are transitioning from their monolithic frameworks to microservices-based architecture in the interest of agility. In that scenario, containers will play a crucial role in leveraging microservices. Benefits such as a lightweight environment, fine-grained performance, and scalability for enterprises that opt for containerization make them a great proposition. And so, it’s no wonder that the talk leading into

I am excited to attend VMworld 2019 next week. Among many other interesting topics, we will learn more about VMware's strategy on Container Networking, Running Container-Based Workloads on VMware Cloud Foundation, Supporting Container-Based ML with PKS, Container solutions for VCPP cloud providers, VMware vSphere Integrated Containers, and many more! So, stay tuned..