In order to successfully host the internet scale applications organizations are seriously considering migrating to Containers and Microservices. Few companies had containers on their product roadmap in 2014. In 2015 almost every organisation was either testing or evaluating them.
With computes running in hundreds if not thousands and the need to cater to any kind of surge in user traffic organization see the solution in Containers and Microservices approach. Soon Containers and Microservices would become table stakes.
Agility
The Microservices architecture allows one to break things into smaller services which adds to the ability to make changes in response to a bug or a new feature request much faster. These services when developed in containers makes it super easy and quick to deploy on QA or production systems.
Environment deployment times have reduced from 4-6 hours to minutes thanks to containers. Containers are created from an image. Image creation is fast and easy. The whole cycle from development to deployment is drastically reduced giving an edge to companies by releasing features at a faster pace.
Operability
Most of the organizations are scaling up quiet fast and need technologies that would be easy to operate at such a scale. The use of containers holds a promise to ease the whole task of operability as the applications scales out horizontally and elastically. Container is slowly becoming the fundamental & standard unit of deployment.
Portability
Even with VMs shipping code from development environment to production is a problem. VM images have to be converted and transferred both of which are slow operations. Unlike VMs, Containers are not restricted to a specific cloud providers.
Containers provide write once, run anywhere design that improves the portability in a big way. Containers are easy to move as container images are broken down into layers. When updating and distributing an image, only relevant layers are shipped. One can build, ship, and run any app, anywhere.
Cost Savings
With containers businesses can optimize infrastructure resources, standardize environments and reduce time to market. Running containers is less resource intensive than running VMs. Docker enables users to run their containers wherever they please either in a Cloud or on-premise. thus avoiding vendor or Cloud lock-ins. One can move their containers to any Docker host on any infrastructure from Amazon, Google, or Azure whichever is the best for their budget.
Scalability
Elastic (Scaling) is a new normal. Monolithic applications are difficult to scale let alone elastic scaling. The solution is to migrate to microservices architecture. The scaling of a particular micro service is far more easy because if a particular microservice becomes a bottleneck due to slow execution, it can run multiple instances on different machines to process data in parallel.
With the monolithic systems you would have to run a copy of the complete system on a different machine making it far more difficult. With Containers and microservices organization can elastically and horizontally scale their application dynamically in response to the spike in user traffic.
Resilient
With microservices architecture even if a particular service goes down it would not cause the crash of the whole application. Services are up front designed for failure and for the unavailability of other services.
Developer Experience
The developer experience with Docker has improved multi-fold in the recent past. Developers love the experience with Containers as it allows them to package up an application with all of the parts it needs (such as libraries), ship it and run it. The Application that runs in Developers machine works in QA and production without any hassles. A developer machine can run tons of containers which may not be possible with VMs. The same container built for development are also deployed to production.
Summary
While both Containers and microservices have existed independently for a long time they work best when put together. The benefits of microservice architectures are amplified when used in combination with containers. Container-based development are a great option for microservices,
DevOps, and continuous deployment, all of which are critical to an organizations success.
Containers can share more context than VMs thus making them a better partners of microservices as it helps to decouple complexity. Docker is available on all modern Linux variants. Many IAAS providers have server images with Docker. There are multiple mature container orchestration engines like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm and Apache Mesos.
