Today it is safe to say that containers and container orchestration have left the hype phase and are quickly becoming mainstream application development technologies.
But what is a container, exactly? A container is a resource-isolated software object that packages all the code, configurations, and dependencies needed to execute and run an application on any Linux or Windows platform, regardless of the environment (onpremises, public or private cloud, or even bare metal). Because multiple containers can share a single operating system (OS), they are significantly more lightweight than virtual machines (VMs). Container orchestration platforms, such as Kubernetes, automatically launch clusters of containers and manage their entire lifecycle, making it easier to deploy containers at scale.
In this white paper, we explore at some depth what is driving the growth of containers, as well as the opportunities and challenges of a specific container use case: databases.