Best Practices for Shipping Software With Containers
What is a cheap and easy way to get a lot of stuff from one place to another? A shipping container, of course! And there exists a digital equivalent, which serves a similar purpose for developers and large-scale software companies: Containers.
This article will explain what containers are in programming and their uses. We will also offer some instructions and determinations regarding whether or not this software solution will be a good fit for you.
What Are Containers?
A container is a standardized software component that packages code and its dependencies to ensure that the application runs quickly and consistently across different computing environments. A project’s code, system tools, runtime, settings and libraries are included in an independent, lightweight, executable package known as a “container image.” At the beginning of runtime, container images become containers.
Containerized software is accessible for Windows and Linux apps, and it consistently functions the same way regardless of the infrastructure. Each project is separated from its surroundings by containers, which ensure that the project operates consistently despite variations, such as those between development and testing.
According to Docker, one of the two major competitors in the container industry, containers offer the following benefits:
- Standardization: They’re portable anywhere.
- Lightweight: Because containers share the machine’s OS system kernel, they eliminate the need for a separate OS for each application, increasing server efficiency and lowering server and license costs.
- Secure: Applications in containers are safer since they’re isolated there.
You can run numerous containers similar to how many virtual machines can run on a single host, whether virtual or physical. However, in contrast to VMs, managing the OS for a container frees you up to concentrate on the creation of applications and the supporting infrastructure. Furthermore, it implies that you can isolate a program so that it won’t be impacted by any other OS-supported processes.
Containers offer a quick way to dynamically start and stop the resources needed for an application to run. As application demands grow, building and deploying virtual machines (VMs) is possible, but scaling out with containers is quicker.
When using containers, you can also swiftly resume in case of a hardware failure or crash. Because they “contain” application dependencies to function in different settings, containers make it possible to move any software with minimal to no code changes from development to production. Another important aspect of application development and maintenance is the integration with the different developer tools provided by Microsoft.
Finally, the application development agility you get by running many app versions on the same host is one of the most important benefits of embracing containers without resource conflicts.
The Microsoft Container Example
Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service’s Windows containers are the newest service to receive clearance. To test out its new product internally, Microsoft decided to fundamentally alter one of its largest product lines.
For a bit of clarity, Microsoft 365 is different from Office 365. Office 365 is a cloud program that includes Outlook (one of the best email providers for handling large files), Excel and various other offerings. Microsoft 365 is a software suite that includes Office 365 and more.
To make the Microsoft 365 platform more adaptable and scalable in light of the quick changes in work patterns brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft has spent the last year or so working to transition significant portions of the platform onto AKS.
According to Marc Power, partner software architect at Microsoft, “We’re going to see substantial business savings—not just from packing applications together in AKS clusters or using containers instead of VMs, but by creating one platform for all our application developers.”
Can My Project Use Containers?
There are specific types of projects that are ideal for containers. Here’s a list to help you determine if containers are good for you:
- Console programs are excellent candidates for containers because they are not constrained by the GUI.
- Windows services could benefit from containers, too, since these run in the background without requiring any input from the user. Depending on the application requirements, use the appropriate base container image. Any containerized background process must be continuously running by a foreground process.
- Web applications are excellent projects to be containerized because they can benefit from the scalability containers offer.
Transition Phase
Use the following general advice to arrange the procedure once you’ve determined whether your application is ready for containerization:
- Choose between the different Windows OS base images you need.
- Choose between process or Hyper-V-isolation options to determine the type of isolation mode for your container. Microsoft says that AKS on Azure Stack HCI and AKS do not currently support Hyper-V-isolated containers, but they will eventually.
- For app-compatibility reasons, pick the appropriate Windows Server version for your app. The bare minimum version you’ll need for containers is Windows Server 2016. Also, AKS and AKS on Azure Stack HCI only support Windows Server 2019 and 2022 as container host OS right now.
- Make sure that the container environment is verified by the security regulations of your firm.
- Take into account the need for load balancing. Containers don’t move by themselves, but you can use an orchestrator to handle alterations of load and availability with automatic horizontal scaling or to auto-start and stop containers on cluster nodes.
- Think about orchestration. Once you’ve containerized your application, it probably needs some sort of automation management tool.
- Containerize your application.
- Send the application to a repository of images. As a result, the image can be downloaded by the container hosts in all environments, including development, testing and production.
The Final Decision
Now that you’ve digested all that information, there are a few decisions to be made to determine whether containers will be the best fit for your company. Here’s the main takeaway: Containers are fast, easy to use, portable and add a layer of protection to your project.
Containers are specific to the tasks you need to use them for; however, they offer many benefits for companies of all sizes. Microsoft is proving its hypothesis correct by implementing containers into one of its biggest product lines-Microsoft 365. Time and user or developer reviews will determine if containers were the way to go for 365, but as of now, it seems like their transition is paying off.