Benefits of containers

The following are a few benefits of containerization:

• Monolithic apps to microservices: Microservices is an architecture pattern in which a single monolithic application is split into thin manageable components. This promotes having focused development teams, smoother operations, and instant scalability at each module. Containers are ideal deployment targets for microservices. For example, you can have a frontend web app run in an inpidual container and other background services such as e-mail sending process, thumbnail generator, and so on, run in separate containers. This makes them update inpidually, scale as per load, and better resource management.
• Configuration as code: Containers allow you to create, start, stop, and configure containers using clean instruction sets. Integrating code as part of the application build system enables a lot of automation options. For example, you can create and configure containers as part of your CI and CD pipelines automatically so that development teams can ship increments at a faster pace.
• Favors DevOps: DevOps is a cultural shift in the way operations and developer teams work together seamlessly to validate and push increments to production systems. Containers help faster provisioning of dev/test environments for running various intermediate steps such as unit testing, security testing, integration testing, and so on. Many of these might need preplanning for infra procurement, provisioning, and environment setup. Containers can be quickly packaged and deployed using an existing infrastructure.
• Modern app development with containers: Many new open source technologies are designed using containers or microservices in mind, so that when applications are built using these technologies they are inherently container aware. For example, ASP.NET Core/ASP.NET 5 applications can be deployed to Linux/Windows alike because ASP.NET Core is technically isolated from web servers and the runtime engine. It can run on Linux with net core as a runtime engine and Kestrel as a web server.