Containerization: A Key Strategy for Business Agility by Jim Wilcox
Introduction
As part of any modernization project, one of the key goals is to improve software development and platform engineering. This is essential for delivering high-quality products and services to customers. This post aims to help expose some of the common challenges that developers often face and how to apply containerization to reduce or offload those challenges from the engineering team.
These challenges include:
Managing multiple applications with different requirements, dependencies, and environments.
Ensuring compatibility and interoperability between applications and platforms.
Scaling and updating applications to meet changing demands and expectations.
Troubleshooting and resolving issues across the software development lifecycle.
Optimizing the use of resources and minimizing costs and risks.
Making sure platform lock-in is avoided as much as possible going forward.
Ensuring consistency, traceability, and transparency of platform versions and configurations across deployments.
To achieve this as detailed below, we propose adopting containerization as a key strategy for business agility.
What is Containerization?
Containerization is a method of packaging and deploying applications in isolated and lightweight units called containers.
Containers are like virtual machines, but they have some key differences:
Containers run on a shared operating system and infrastructure, while virtual machines run on separate operating systems and hypervisors.
Containers are smaller and faster than virtual machines, as they only contain the application code and its dependencies, while virtual machines contain the entire operating system and its components.
Containers are more portable and scalable than virtual machines, as they can be easily moved and replicated across different platforms and clouds.
Containerization enables developers to create and run applications that are consistent, reliable, and secure, regardless of the underlying hardware platform. Containerization also simplifies aspects of the management and orchestration of multiple workflows that form a complex application or system.
Why Containerize Your Applications?
Containerization offers several benefits for engineering, such as:
Speed of development. Containers enable faster and more frequent delivery of software updates, as they reduce the dependencies and conflicts between different components and environments. Developers can build and deploy containers independently, without worrying about compatibility issues or breaking changes. “Works on my machine” can have a bit more weigh if developers are running in essentially the same container configuration that gets deployed. Containers also support continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, which automate the testing and deployment of software changes.
Developer enablement. Containers empower developers to work more autonomously and productively, as they can modernize tools and languages, and test and debug their applications more frequently. Developers can also reuse and share container images, which are the templates for creating containers, and leverage the existing libraries and frameworks that are available in the container ecosystem.
Release Management. Developers can focus more on solving the problems at hand, and less on managing releases and deployments. Rather than having developers get involved in version tracking, problematic deployment rollbacks, and disaster recovery efforts, they can remain focused on engineering solutions.
Security. Again, developers can focus more on solving the problem at hand. Containers inherently enhance security by isolating applications from each other and from the host system, and by allowing granular control over access and permissions. Containers also support encryption and signing of container images and data, which prevent unauthorized tampering and ensure integrity. As an added benefit, containers also facilitate compliance with security standards and regulations, such as PCI DSS and HIPAA.
Improved Talent Pool. By opening and modernizing platforms through use of containers, job reqs can be less specific. This makes them more attractive to more candidates. This helps attract more talent in more competitive skills markets, leading to lower costs.
Cost Reduction. In addition to developer enablement, containers have the added advantage of taking workflow cost optimization off engineers’ hands. Containers do this by optimizing the utilization of resources and by enabling scalability and portability of applications across different platforms and clouds. Containers consume less CPU, memory, and disk space than virtual machines, and can be dynamically allocated (and deallocated!) based on the demand. Containers also allow your team to migrate its applications to the cloud of its choice, such as Microsoft Azure, without requiring significant changes or investments.
Challenges that Containerization Solves
Containerization enables your team to reduce engineering overhead for some of the common challenges of traditional application development and deployment, such as:
Complexity and inconsistency. Different applications may have different requirements and configurations, which can make them difficult to manage and maintain across multiple environments and platforms.
Resource inefficiency and waste. Applications may consume more resources than they need, or leave unused resources idle, which can result in higher costs and lower performance.
Security and compliance risks. Applications may be vulnerable to attacks or breaches, or may not meet the regulatory standards or policies, which can expose your organization to legal and reputational damages.
One of the core principles of containerization is to treat the platform infrastructure as a part of the software product, rather than a collection of large, manually configured, and manually managed resources. This means applying the same software engineering practices, such as version control, testing, continuous integration, and continuous delivery, to the platform code, which defines the desired state and configuration of the infrastructure. By using platform as code, your team can automate and standardize its platform provisioning, deployment, and management, and ensure that its platform is consistent, reliable, and reproducible across different environments and stages of development. Platform as code also enables your IT organization to collaborate and iterate on its platform design and functionality, and to track and audit the changes and updates made to the platform over time.
To implement containerization and platform as code, your team can easily build on adoption of cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure. For example, by applying a combination of Azure tools and services, such as Azure Resource Manager, Azure DevOps, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, and Azure Cloud Shell. Azure Resource Manager is a service that allows developers to create, organize, and manage its platform resources through declarative templates, which specify the parameters and dependencies of the infrastructure components. Azure DevOps is a set of cloud-based services that provide end-to-end containerization and platform as code capabilities, such as source control, build automation, testing, deployment, and monitoring. Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, and Azure Cloud Shell are command-line tools that enable the team to interact with and manage its platform resources programmatically, using scripts and commands.
By adopting containerization and platform as code principles and cloud, your organization can achieve platform agility, with several benefits, such as:
Significantly reduced engineering blockage while waiting for infrastructure spin up (and even tear down) for environments. (These can potentially happen in minutes, instead of getting scheduled on six-month road maps.)
Faster and more frequent improvement deliveries, with reduced errors and risks.
Improved product quality and reliability, with fewer support issues.
Enhanced product security and compliance, with automated policies and controls.
Increased workflow scalability and availability, with dynamic resource allocation and load balancing.
Greater platform portability and interoperability (agility), with standardized and modularized components.
How to Implement Containerization
To implement containerization, your organization will need to choose a containerization host platform, such as Docker or Kubernetes, which provides the tools and services to create, manage, and run containers. Docker is the most popular and widely used containerization platform, which offers a simple and intuitive interface and a rich set of features. Kubernetes is an open-source platform that orchestrates and scales clusters of containers, and provides high availability, load balancing, and service discovery. Both Docker and Kubernetes are compatible with each other and with other platforms and clouds.
You will also need to choose a container image management platform, such as Docker Hub or Azure Container Registry, which provides the storage and distribution of container images. A container image is a file that contains the application code and its dependencies, and can be used to create and run containers. A container image management platform allows you to store, organize, and access container images, and to integrate them with its CI/CD pipelines and security tools.
Additionally, you will need to consider the hardware platform that will host the containers, such as on-premises servers or cloud-based virtual machines. The hardware platform should have sufficient capacity and performance to run the containers and should support the chosen containerization host platform. The hardware platform should also be secure and reliable and should comply with the relevant regulations and policies.
Again, if you are already using a cloud platform like Microsoft Azure, as an alternative to building out infrastructure in-house, you can benefit from the various containerization platform support offerings that Azure provides. Azure supports both Docker and Kubernetes and allows you to run containers on Azure Container Instances, Azure App Service, Azure Kubernetes Service, or Azure Service Fabric. Azure also offers Azure Container Registry, a fully managed container image management platform that integrates with Azure DevOps, Azure Monitor, and Azure Security Center. Azure Container Registry enables you to store and manage container images securely and efficiently, and to automate its image builds and deployments. By using Azure for containerization, your team can leverage the scalability, reliability, and security of the cloud, and simplify its container orchestration and management. Azure also provides tools and services to help you migrate existing applications to containers, such as Azure Migrate and Azure Dev Spaces. Azure Migrate assesses the readiness and suitability of your applications for containerization, and Azure Dev Spaces enables you to test and debug containerized applications in a realistic environment.
Developers themselves will need to be equipped with desktops that are capable of running containers. This means sufficient memory and disk, and, typically, hardware virtualization acceleration support. Operating systems like Windows need Hyper-V support and potentially Docker Desktop or Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2). If you use a VDI, you’ll need to make sure it supports containers as well. Keep in mind cloud-based options, not excluding innovative services like GitHub DevSpace. DevSpace, and similar services, essentially uses containers directly as developer desktops.
Take Aways | Next Steps
Adopting containerization is a key strategy for supporting business agility. Containerization will enable your organization to accelerate its software development and delivery, empower its developers, enhance security, and reduce costs. Containerization will also prepare your team for the future, as it will facilitate migration to the cloud and reduce friction in adoption of new technologies and innovations.
As next steps, consider starting with a pilot project to containerize one or more of its existing applications and evaluate the results. As needed, leverage expertise and guidance from consulting partners like EQengineered to design and implement a containerization strategy that aligns with strategic business goals and technical requirements. By adopting containerization, your team will be able to improve its software development and platform engineering practices and gain a competitive edge in the market.
We look forward to working with you especially on your exciting digital transformation journey, and we invite you to contact us for any questions or clarifications.