Containers
A-to-Zerto Glossary of Terms
Overview
Normally, data is broken into discrete segments. A container is like a box that combines all the segments needed to run an application—and nothing else. Containers offer developers agility and decoupling of layers, regardless of infrastructure. Containers are typically coordinated and managed using a container orchestration platform, such as Kubernetes.
Related Topics
What Are Containers ?
Containers are lightweight, standalone data packages that hold only what’s needed to make an application run. They are created by combining applications from multiple disk images from one or more repositories with the application’s dependencies (libraries, binaries, and additional configuration files). Container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes have become the standard for running applications and workloads in enterprise-level systems.
Containers are designed to run on one shared operating system, eliminating portability and compatibility issues. Kubernetes has the ability to automatically scale containers up or down as workload requirements change, therefore increasing application performance and availability. Because containers handle data differently, they require an innovative approach to data protection and disaster recovery compared to virtual machines.
Containers 101
Stateful vs. Stateless Containers
Why Choose Containers?
Containerization offers significant benefits to software developers that range across many different topics.
Portability—Containers are not reliant on the underlying OS of the platform they are running on; this gives developers one less thing to worry about and frees up time to focus on the application itself.
Scalability—Containers can handle larger loads by refactoring existing architecture to enable resources using a microservice-oriented app design. By splitting out small parts of each app, the microservices can be scaled individually, omitting the need to involve the whole application.
Speed—Containers are “lightweight” because they share the host machine’s OS kernel and therefore have no additional overheads. This small footprint drives higher server densities and reduces server and licensing costs. It also speeds up boot time because there is no OS to boot.
How to Choose Between VMs, Containers, and Serverless
The CIO Guide to Preparing for Containers
Other Resources
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Learn about containers and Kubernetes to understand how container protection and recovery work.
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