At Adaptigent, we’re into containers, and it’s not just because we like a neat and tidy office with a place for everything and everything in its place.
No, we’re talking about virtual containers, the kind that exist as a ready-to-run software package, containing everything needed to run an application. We love them because for application developers, “containerization” provides a method to help ensure the business derives the maximum value from their activities. And because they are perfectly suited to work with Adaptive Integration Fabric, our flagship mainframe modernization solution that creates and maintains powerful APIs through a drag-and-drop interface that does not require mainframe experience or writing a single line of code.
Adaptigent was one of the first companies to receive certification for the Red Hat Marketplace for OpenShift, a platform managing containerized apps, providing consistent packaging, deployment and lifecycle management.
Why containerize?
Containerization is operating system-level virtualization or application-level virtualization over multiple network resources. In an ideal world, applications would produce the same output regardless of the environment. Containerization makes that ideal easier to reach. Containerized applications will start, stop, make requests, and log the same way in different environments.
When people refer to moving their workloads from physical, on-premises servers to the cloud, they’re most likely using containers to do it.
Containerization is operating system-level virtualization or application-level virtualization over multiple network resources.
While there are different ways to accomplish what containers do, they’ve become the go-to solution for many due to the unique combination of benefits. Containers are great at optimizing:
- Scalability – Build and deploy containerized applications in minutes
- Speed – Faster time to market
- Agility – Quick deployment of updates and changes to applications
- Security – Good protection, mitigation, and resolution of security issues
In a way, containers are an extension of virtual machines (VM). Unlike a physical machine, VMs exist only as code. They’re a virtual software-defined computer that runs on a specialized operating system called a hypervisor. A hypervisor is the software that sits between the physical hardware and the VM, and it directs resources to the VM as needed.
Whereas VMs virtualize the hardware, containers virtualize the application processes — no matter where they are run, whether it’s on-premises, virtualized, or in the cloud.
Containers are mass-produced and identical. Set-up is consistent. Additional configuration changes are unnecessary. There’s no downside to decommissioning a container and starting another.
The ease of use, fast deployment, and consistent experience mean developers can spend less time debugging and more time delivering business value.
Orchestration tools
When you add orchestration tools like Kubernetes, you make it easier to automate and scale container-based workloads for live production environments.
Kubernetes automates operational tasks of container management and includes built-in commands for deploying applications, executing changes and scaling up and down as needed, monitoring your applications, and more, making it easier to manage applications.
With these handy tools, your application developers can answer the need for faster delivery, agility, portability, modernization, and lifecycle management.