Organizations constantly struggle between embracing technological changes to open up new business opportunities and protecting the business from new challenges and risks. In this paper, we’ll examine containerization and how the adoption of this technology in F5 products affects IT professionals, architects, and business decision makers.
In the last 20 years, virtualization has transformed server computing, enabling multiple separate operating systems to run on one hardware platform. A more modern approach is containerization (or operating system virtualization), which enables multiple apps to run on a single instance of a host operating system. Each app instance then shares the binaries and libraries installed into the single operating system instance. Figure 1 compares these approaches.
Unlike virtual machines (VMs), containers can share the same operating system, virtualizing at the OS level, rather than the hypervisor level.
Not surprisingly, developers like containers because they make developing and deploying applications and spinning up microservices quick and easy. Containerization also enables greater portability, as apps in containers are easier to deploy to different operating systems, hardware platforms, and cloud services. Containers use up fewer resources than applications running directly on bare metal-hosted operating systems or on virtual machines.
Generally, most of the discussion (and documentation) about containers focuses on the programming or DevOps perspective. As an IT professional, system architect, or business decision maker, while you appreciate the flexibility that containerization can bring, you may have genuine concerns about how this change will affect administration, management, and monitoring of apps and services within your environment. You also want to ensure that containerization does not adversely affect network and app security.