It wasn’t that long ago when the mainstream technology world was all abuzz with this whole virtualization thing. It didn’t take long before every enterprise was developing a virtualization strategy. In fact virtualization is a requirement for most enterprise IT shops seeking to enable automation and standardization of infrastructure.

Containers are quickly becoming mainstream due, in part, to Docker. What is a container? It’s another form of virtualization, but rather than emulating hardware like a virtual machine, it’s provided an isolated software environment on top of an existing operating system. Certain system resources, such as operating system binaries, are shared amongst the containers on an operation system. Other resources can be dedicates to ensure performance of a container. This containerization allows for the standardization of application deployment and delivery. This is a change in how we build and delivery software services.

As more and more businesses move to cloud infrastructures services they are faces with the challenge of application portability. Avoiding vendor lock in of your cloud provider’s specific platform offering is a big challenges – and containers are a great solution. As long are your provider supports the base operation system, you can move your workload as you see fit. We also get the benefit of cost savings compared to our virtual environment. Since we aren’t wasting resources emulating hardware, we can gain much better efficiencies.

These benefits, along with the DevOps movement, will make containers an integral part of the enterprise It landscape.