What is containerization in DevOps?

A type of OS virtualization is software containers where the running container incorporates only the lowest working system memory, resources, and services needed to run a service or application. Containers empower engineers to work with identical development stacks and environments. But, they likewise encourage DevOps by empowering the utilization of stateless structures.

The essential use for containers has been dedicated around streamlining DevOps with a simple developer to test to create streams for service deployed, frequently in the cloud. An image of Docker can be made that can be deployed identically over any condition like a flash. Containers offer designers benefits in three territories:

1. Immediate startup of working framework resources
2. Container Environments can be templatized, replicated, and blessed for the deployments of production. 
3. A little impression leads to more prominent execution with a higher security profile.

The mix of a quick startup that originates from OS virtualization and the reliable execution that originates from resource governance and namespace isolation makes containers perfect for application testing and development. During the process of development, designers can rapidly emphasize. Since its resource and environment utilization are consistent crosswise over frameworks, a containerized application that deals with a designer’s framework will work a similar path in a production system.

The small footprint and instant startup also advantage cloud situations. More instances of the application can fit onto a device than if they were all in their own VM, which enables applications to scale-out rapidly.

Container Platform Providers

There are a number of vendors that provide container management and container platform tools. Below are a few of the popular tools currently:

1. Docker
2. AWS ECR
3. CoreOS’rkt (Rocket)
4. Google Kubernetes Engine
5. Portainer
6. Marathon
7. Azure Kubernetes Service
8. Open Stack Magnum
9. Hashicorp Nomad
10. Swarm

System Containers and Application Containers

Application containers, for example, Docker involved the application dependencies, files, and libraries of an application to work on any OS. For a micro-service based architecture, multiple application containers can be run where all service can make up the application work freely from each other.

On the other side, System containers, for example, LXC are similar to both VMs and application containers. A system container can work an OS like how an OS would work in a VM. Besides, a system container doesn’t interrupt system hardware. It may be simply installed as an application container and a client can install various dependencies and libraries.

Popular Tools in DevOps

1. SCM: Subversion, Git, GitHub
2. Repository management: Docker Hub
3. Testing Tools: Junit and Selenium
4. Continuous Integration: Visual Studio, Jenkins
5. Build: Maven, Ant, Make, MS Build
6. Containers: Kubernetes, Docker
7. Configuration management: Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible
8. Collaboration: Team Foundation, Jira, slack
9. Cloud: AZURE, AWS, Rackspace, OpenShift
10. Logging: Splunk
11. BI/Monitoring: Elasticsearch, Kibana, Nagios

Benefits of Containers

1. Multi-Cloud Platform – One of the significant advantages of Containers that it can work on the cloud. They help a platform of multi-cloud and can be run on GCP, Rackspace, AWS, and Virtual Box. 
2. Shares a similar OS – Containers share a similar OS part as the host. Thus, containers can be more productive than VM as it requires a different OS to run. 
3. CD-CI and Testing – Containers are steadfast all through the application which regulates to an agile environment and the methodologies like Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration (CD-CI). 
4. Portability – Containers have preferable portability over other hosting progress. They can travel along with any framework. The container design is likewise portable because it is only a file to share. 
5. Version Control – This is one of the most significant methods of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Docker provides version control that makes it simple to move back to a past picture if your arrangement breaks. 
6. Cost-Efficient – They are cost-efficient also. Regardless of putting resources into CPU, memory, and storage, it is conceivable to help numerous containers on a similar infrastructure. 
7. Speed – Containers turn quicker than VMs which is significant for distributed applications.

Disadvantages of Containers

1. Security Concern – Because containers share a host that’s why the potential risks are easy to penetrate to the framework because of the shortage of isolation that is no more in hypervisor-based virtualization. 
2. Lack of Isolation – Another problem is found that a container is the OS flexibility lack which states that containers must be of a similar OS as of the Base OS. Otherwise, in hypervisor-based virtualization, even Windows OS can virtualize Linux based OS as well as Windows. 
3. Monitoring – It is difficult to monitor containers when many containers are running on a similar server. 
4. Features – Most of the massive features in containers are still in the phase of development like a monitoring system, security tracking system, and so on.

Most Frequently Used Tools

Vagrant

A Vagrant is a tool that encourages DevOps groups to configure and create reproducible, lightweight, and portable development environments. It likewise includes simple to-utilize work processes and focuses on automation, DevOps team time-saving in setting up environments for development.

Jenkins

Jenkins is a web-empowered tool through the web server or application like Tomcat, for continuous deployment, build, and testing and can be incorporated with tools of a build like a source code repository Git and Maven or Ant.

GitHub

A famous open-source version control system is known as Git. It’s a hosted service that is web-based for Git repositories. GitHub enables you to host remote Git stores and has an abundance of network-based services that make it perfect for open-source ventures.

Docker

Docker utilizes containers that package everything up in the application, a box, and its dependencies. It runs as an isolated procedure on a host working framework. Offering the kernel to a different container. It appreciates allocation benefits and resource isolation like VMs but is significantly more efficient and portable.

Conclusion

The Containers and Virtual machines differ in a few different ways, however, Containers are ideal for an enterprise that is searching for an answer that offers portability, reliability, reproducibility, and versatility in a virtual environment. The cost and efficiency competition that containerization-as-an service (CaaS) can provide is driving its selection. Also, get AWS DevOps certification training and other top tools training to get the better advantages of DevOps containerization.