Containers

Containers are lightweight packages of your application code together with dependencies such as specific versions of programming language runtimes and libraries required to run your software services.

What are containers?

Containers are packages of software that contain all of the necessary elements to run in any environment. In this way, containers virtualize the operating system and run anywhere, from a private data center to the public cloud or even on a developer’s personal laptop. From Gmail to YouTube to Search, everything at Google runs in containers. Containerization allows our development teams to move fast, deploy software efficiently, and operate at an unprecedented scale.

What are containers used for?

Containers offer a logical packaging mechanism in which applications can be abstracted from the environment in which they actually run. This decoupling allows container-based applications to be deployed easily and consistently, regardless of whether the target environment is a private data center, the public cloud, or even a developer’s personal laptop.

• Microservices:

  Containers are small and lightweight, which makes them a good match for microservice architectures where applications are constructed of many, loosely coupled and independently deployable smaller services.

• DevOps:

  The combination of microservices as an architecture and containers as a platform is a common foundation for many teams that embrace DevOps as the way they build, ship and run software.

• Hybrid, multi-cloud:

  Because containers can run consistently anywhere, across laptop, on-premises and cloud environments, they are an ideal underlying architecture for hybrid cloud and multicloud scenarios where organizations find themselves operating across a mix of multiple public clouds in combination with their own data center.

• Application modernizing and migration:

  One of the most common approaches to application modernization starts by containerizing them so that they can be migrated to the cloud.