Containerization in DevOps goes hand in hand to ensure proper software organization. With containerization, you can keep all your software dependencies in a single container-like structure, promoting portability and support on any device. Earlier, when applications were monolithic, any simple change required restructuring, building, and deploying the entire application. Nowadays, applications are mostly working on a microservice architecture, which makes them more flexible, accessible, and easy to modify.
Containerization is a popular practice nowadays, with almost all applications adopting this practice to ensure that the software application can run on any device. Here, we will learn more about containers and containerization in DevOps.
What Are Containers?
There are many servers, platforms, and highly distinct environments available, and ensuring software compatibility on any server is a tough task. You will have to keep all libraries needed, tools that are of specific versions, enough permissions, files, directories, and more. These are some of the prior conditions you need to meet to ensure accessibility of the software application on any server.
Containers are made to solve the problem of such diversification of dependencies by packaging these tools, libraries, files, and directories into a single executable file, which comes to be known as “Container”. This enables your software to run on any server or environment without worrying about anything too complex. Let us come to the definition of containers, then,
“Containers are simple and lightweight environments capable of packaging the entire dependency of an application i,e., libraries, runtime, configuration files, and more into a single unit.”
Containers are virtual environments built on the concept of virtual machines, but they are very different. The main difference lies unlike VM, which virtualizes the hardware, containers virtualize the operating system, making it more efficient and portable than virtual machines.
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What Is Containerization In DevOps?
Containerization is a method of packing your application together with all its major dependencies, including files, directories, libraries, versions, and more, making them more accessible and portable. This process makes the application capable of running anywhere, on any server, environment, or device.
With containerization, all your application codes, files, and libraries, which are required to run any application on any device, are kept together. In DevOps, containerization ensures consistency of application throughout the software development life cycle i,e. Development, testing, and production.
Containerization DevOps: How Are They Related?
Containerization DevOps are closely connected, as this method of containerization makes devOps possible, but how? Let us know below with the help of some pointers.
- DevOps speeds up the development process, automates testing, ensures consistency, and speeds up delivery. It requires a proper, isolated, and consistent environment to make it happen, which is possible only with the help of containerization.
- Containerization makes the application capable of running everywhere by including all dependencies in a single portable unit. This makes things easier for DevOps as it needs portability as its key ingredient.
- Containers allow easier integration with the CI/CD pipelines in DevOps.
With containerization, applications can run consistently through different environments, whether it is the developer’s laptop, testing zone, production server, or others. This practice speeds up the deployment process significantly.
What Is The Difference Between Virtualization And Containerization In DevOps?
Virtualization, or say VMs, are very much similar to containers, but Virtual machines work on a separate OS, virtualizing the system hardware. Containers use the host OS for most of their processes.
- VMs are complex and require a full system to replicate the host environment, while Containers are lightweight, using only the resources needed to run the application, while leaving the rest aside.
- When containers produce images, they are comparatively smaller in size and are easier to share than VM images.
- VMs can overload the system as they run separately on system hardware in a separate environment, while containers are also isolated, but can access resources from other processes.
- Terraform and Ansible are popular tools used for the deployment and integration of Virtual machines.
- Kubernetes is used to integrate multiple containers within a system to ensure effective SDLC.
The Role of Containerization In DevOps
DevOps is a modern way of offering effective integration and faster delivery of software applications to match the high demand and quality factors. Containerization in DevOps makes this more possible by providing all resources in one place, ensuring flexibility, scalability, and portability across multiple platforms and environments.
Containers are not mandatory for DevOps, but they can help it reach its objectives more effectively based on the particular requirements and needs of an organisation or individual. Some of the major benefits Containerization in DevOps are listed below.
1. Faster Delivery
For continuous delivery of application changes needs to be frequent implementation is needed without affecting the other fine working areas of software.
This is ensured by lightweight containers, which separate parts of applications into individual containers. This makes it easier for devOps teams to focus on a particular solution instead of unintended consequences.
2. More Reliable
Containers ensure consistency across all major platforms and environments making it easier to commit, merge, and deploy code. This lightens loads for devOps teams as they experience fewer integration issues and can implement automation and pipelines for different stages of software development.
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3. High Portability
Containerization in DevOps makes applications portable, where applications are built as Docker images, tested, and deployed directly in production environments using tools like GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, GitHub actions, and more.
4. More Secure
Containers are isolated, working in their own environment, which ensures that if one container fails, it does not affect others. This adds an extra layer of security and stability to an application, also helping devOps teams easily manage multiple users and application components.
5. Efficiency
The applications running in a containerized application share the Operating system kernel with other kernels, making them lightweight and less complex than a virtual machine. It increases
Architecture of Containerization In DevOps
There are four major essential component layers in a containerization architecture. Check them below.
1. Infrastructure Layer
The infrastructure layer in Containerization devOps forms the foundation layer i,e. Base layer. It includes servers, virtual machines, and cloud resources. This layer ensures proper connection, storage, and computing power supporting both cloud-based online premises and data center offline premises.
2. Container Runtime Layer
This layer is responsible for running containers and managing their overall performance on the host operating system. It ensures a proper active state of the system OS with tools and environment to create and monitor containers.
- This layer isolates containers from one another using the OS level virtualization
- It ensures that each container has its own resources, including storage, memory, system files, and more, sharing the same OS Kernel.
- This layer makes containers lightweight and fast when compared to VMs.
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3. Container Image
This layer contains an executable lightweight package that includes everything that is required to run a specific application. It is also known as a runtime engine that runs on top of the host operating system and virtualizes the resources required for running a containerized application.
4. Containerized Application
This layer is all about applications that run in containers, where users interact with the applications, such as web applications, APIs, databases, and other background services.
In a DevOps pipeline, this layer is continuously updated through CI/CD processes, ensuring faster delivery of new features and bug fixes. It represents the ultimate goal of containerization i,e. delivering scalable, reliable, and portable software services.
Benefits of Containerization In DevOps
The method of Containerization in DevOps makes things easy for DevOps, as these packages really ensure that applications, once coded and prepared, can run anywhere on any device or system. Let us check some major benefits of containerization DevOps below.
- Containerization in DevOps enables consistency across environments, ensuring smooth compatibility and response across development, testing, and production environments.
- Containers are fast, which enables quick iteration, testing, and deployment, crucial for Continious integration and continuous delivery.
- Containers can easily be scaled, ensuring proper integrations and working in crucial situations, such as sudden traffic loads. Kubernetes can be used to scale containers easily based on the requirements.
- They make the application portable i,e. Capable of running on any system, including team laptops, production desks, any cloud servers, and more
- Each container runs independently, having its own resources, and hence if one crashes, it doesn’t affect the other containers.
- Containers easily integrate with DevOps tools like Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and more to build, test, or store images.
- Version control gets really easier with containerization in process. Rollbacks can be implemented instantly in case of bugs or deployment issues.
Tools Used For Containerization In DevOps
With the ever-increasing use of container-based applications, the need for well optimized tools is increasing. Developers can use these tools to build containerized applications and set up environments easily. Docker is one of the most used containerization in Devops platforms for major tasks.
While there are some other tools, we are going to discuss along with Docker. Let us check some of the major tools used for containerization in DevOps processes below.
1. Docker
Docker is a popular platform used in devOps to manage applications, including building, packaging, and running applications inside these lightweight containers.
- Docker is more frequently used in automating CI/CD pipelines, developing microservices, and deploying scalable applications, and more.
- A Dockerfile can be used for automated image building, and Docker Hub can be used for a public image registry.
- It can easily integrate with other DevOps tools tools like Kubernetes, for better productivity.
2. Kubernetes
Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform used for automating the major processes in SDLC, including deployment, scaling, and management of container based applications.
- It can be used to automate the deployment and scaling of containers
- It supports quick rollbacks and load balancing features.
- It can be used to work with multiple runtimes, including Containerd, CRI-O, Docker, and more.
3. OpenShift
This is a Kubernetes-based platform capable of building, deploying and managing containers with more automation features, developer tools, and security features.
- It offers built-in CI/CD automation feature
- It provides role-based access features for better security controls
- It consists of CLI tools for cluster management and more.
- It can integrate GitOps, used for continuous delivery in SDLC
- Deployments can either be done on-premises or cloud-based.
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Containerization In DevOps FAQs
Q1. What is containerization?
Ans: Containerization is a method of packing your application together with all its major dependencies, including files, directories, libraries, versions, and more, making them more accessible and portable.
Q2. What are containers in DevOps?
Ans: Containers are lightweight packages containing all major dependencies of the application, ensuring the application can run in different environments and platforms. This enables faster deployments, delivery, integration, and management of applications in SDLC.
Q3. Is Kubernetes a container?
Ans: Kubernetes is a container based framework used to manage and coordinate containers running in a production-ready environment.
Q4. What are the benefits of Containerization DevOps?
Ans: Containerization devOps offers speed, scalability, portability, isolation, efficiency, automation, and easier rollback.
