Why Companies are Considering Container Technologies?

DevOps automation has become an integral part of large-scale digital transformation projects. Companies have realized that automating their delivery pipelines will not only shorten the release cycle but also help in bringing products faster to market. DevOps has broken the traditional silos between the Dev and Ops team and furthermore one of the Gartner studies states that DevOps culture strategy will be adopted by 25% of the Global 2000 organizations in the near future. Along with the quick adoption of DevOps, a lot of companies are also investing in containers. Thanks to Docker, the pioneers of container technology, the trend is catching up rapidly. From faster deployment to saving cost, container technologies are adopted for multiple benefits.

Why use container technologies?

According to THENEWSTACK outlined below are some of the top reasons why companies prefer using containers:

Apart from the aforementioned reasons, below are some of the other important factors making a strong case for containers:

1. As containers are lightweight, flexible and comprehensive, it can help reducing shipping time of application.
2. Containers help in reducing the time needed in the process of development, testing, and deployment of applications.
3. With containers, bug tracking and the testing process becomes less complicated as there is no such difference between running the applications on a test server, in production or locally.
4. Containers help to accelerate the development process, which aims at minimizing the cycle time of writing code to testing and deploying it.
5. Container technologies enable the business to release new software at a much faster rate, thereby bringing agility.
6. When compared to VMs, containers help increase the scalability from 10 to 100 times, which reduce cost.

According to Cloud-Enabling Technologies Market Monitor Report, the application container market will grow from $762m in 2016 to $2.7bn by 2020

Docker, the pioneers in container technology is a popular container tool for multiple companies. Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS stated “Docker now is building tools for launching cloud servers, systems for clustering, and a wide range of functions: building images, running images, uploading, downloading and eventually even overlay networking, all compiled into one monolithic binary running primarily as root on your server,”

Following are some reasons for enterprises to opt for Docker:

• Agility
• Ease of use
• Security
• Cost saving
• Portability
• Enables independence between applications and infrastructure

Which popular companies adopt Docker and why? Let’s figure below:

Expedia :

Expedia is using Docker in order to revolutionize the travel experience. They are leveraging tools such as Docker engine, Docker Trusted Registry, and Docker Compose. With implementing Docker Trusted Registry in their CI/CD approach, Expedia is able to have more than 200 apps running on AWS at once. Few other benefits of using DTR are portability of containers across local laptops, cost savings, and Audit Logging.

General Motors :

GE is able to build and run anytime owing to portability benefits of Docker. Docker containers pillar GE’s self-service web application Voyager which has helped them to run on an average 14 applications per containers, unlike the previous VMware. Moreover, GE also wanted to migrate everything from legacy system to hybrid cloud environment and Docker enabled swift migration in as less as four months.

PayPal :

Paypal was running on 100,000 VMs. PayPal’s long-standing desire had been to modernize their data center infrastructure and make it on demand. Paypal resorted to Docker leveraging tools such as Docker Commercially Supported engine (CS Engine), Docker Trusted Registry as well as Docker Compose. Docker has helped them to launch app instances in seconds and at the same time add capacity during peak times easily.  With Docker, they are able to deploy quickly and more often. Paypal is also able to optimize the data center infrastructure and enhance productivity with Docker.

Moreover, many successful brands such as MetLife, Uber, Twitter, Google Search and Google App Engine are leveraging Docker.  

This is typically how containers inject change :

While Docker has been revolutionary bringing in containers, there are still some stumbling blocks to look out for:

Some of the top challenges most companies face include monitoring and management of containers as it requires special expertise and guidance along with security, fault isolation, and management of multi-container apps.

Are you pursuing to modernize your infrastructure and overhaul your architecture? Well, don’t overlook containers in such a case. Containerization along with DevOps automation play a crucial role in faster product development. Moreover, with multiple product companies chucking the monolithic architecture and leveraging microservices, containers are a must-have technology. With benefits like fine-grained execution, lightweight runtime environment, and component cohabitation, companies using microservices prefer and find containers a congenial way of running an application.