Top 10 Containerization Technologies in IT

Introduction:

• It is a standardized unit which can be created on the fly to deploy a particular application or environment. 
• Container could be an Ubuntu container, CentOs container and more. 
• Container could be an application oriented container like CakePHP container or a Tomcat-Ubuntu container and more.
• Its main advantage is to package applications in containers, allowing them to be a portable to any system running a Linux or Windows operating system. 

History of Container: 

• In the year 2000 was a busy one in the world of computing. 
• The patent on the RSA cryptographic algorithm ended and the last Multics got turned off. 
• jails, an early implementation of container technology, was added to the FreeBSD.
• In the year 2001, container technology made it to the Linux side. 

Features of container:

• Ease of Deployment and Configuration
• High Scalability
• Pipeline Management
• Increased Overall Productivity
• Process Isolation
• Faster app start-up and easier scaling.
• Flexibility to on virtualized infrastructures or on bare metal servers

Why we use containers:

• Containerization is one of the latest developments in the evolution of cloud computing.
•  Many organizations, both large and small, are looking at containers as a means to improve application life-cycle management through capabilities such as CI/CD. 
• Also, certain implementations of containers conform to the principles of open source, which is appealing to organizations wary of being locked-in to a specific vendor.
• Containers are also the foundation of a private cloud and, just like the early days of cloud computing, are becoming a game changer for many organizations. 

Container Tools:

1) Docker

Docker is a containerization software that performs operating-system-level-virtualization.

The developer of this software is Docker, Inc. The initial release of this software happened in the year 2013. It is written in ‘Go’ programming language. It’s a freemium software as a service and has Apache License 2.0 as the source code license.

Features

• Integrated & Automated container Security Policy.
• Runs trusted images only.
• No Lock-in: Supports almost any type of application, OS, infrastructure, and orchestrator.
• Unified and automated agile operations.
• Portable containers across the cloud.
• Automated governance.

Pros

• Fits very well with CI/CD.
• Saves storage space.
• Plenty of docker images.
• Saves hours in patching and downtime when compared to virtualization.
• While working in a team, you need not worry about the different members having different versions of programming language, libraries, etc.
• Open source.
• A lot of plugins are available to enhance its features.

Cons

• Quite tough to set up.
• Takes a fair amount of time to learn this tool.
• Creating persistent storage requires a lot of effort.
• Does not have a GUI.
• Does not have built-in support for Mac.

2) AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate happens to be a compute engine for Amazon ECS and EKS* which lets you execute containers without any need to manage the servers or clusters.

Using AWS Fargate, you now don’t need to provision, configure, and scale cluster virtual machines to execute containers. This, in turn, eliminates the requirement to select server types, determine at what time to scale your clusters or optimize cluster packing.

Fargate allows you to concentrate on creating your applications rather than just managing the infrastructure that runs them.

Features

• It manages the scaling and infrastructure requirements for containers on its own.
• Allows launching thousands of containers in just seconds.
• Handles the bin packing problem.
• In-built support for the aws vpc network.

Pros

• Building a cloud-native application is very easy with this tool.
• Easy to scale up and scale down the production workloads dynamically.
• Easy integration with the EC-2 instance.
• Allows you to execute containers without worrying about managing clusters and servers.
• Simple and easy to use User Interface.

Cons

• Requires significant effort to learn and implement.
• Quite costly when compared to the other container services.
• As it’s a new product (introduced in 2017), its customer support is not that strong.
• Limited container storage for the task.

3) Google Kubernetes Engine

Google Kubernetes Engine is a managed, production-ready infrastructure for implementing containerized applications. This tool was launched in the year 2015. It totally removes the need to install, handle and operate your own Kubernetes clusters.

Features

• Hybrid networking via Google cloud VPN.
• Identity and access management through Google accounts.
• HIPAA and PCI DSS 3.1 compliant.
• Managed open-source Kubernetes.
• Docker image support.
• Container Optimized OS.
• GPU Support
• Built-in dashboard.

Pros

• Built-in load balancing.
• Very intuitive GUI.
• Effortless setup in Google cloud.
• Auto-scaling
• Very easy to manage configurations.
• Highly secured
• Operates Seamlessly with 99.5% SLA.

Cons

• Setting up a manual cluster is quite a time consuming and costly
• Time-consuming in detecting errors and deploying the automated fix.
• Logs are difficult to understand.
• Need months to expertise in this tool.

4) Amazon ECS

Amazon ECS (an acronym for Elastic Container Service) is an orchestration service that supports Docker containers and permits you to effortlessly execute and scale containerized applications on Amazon AWS.This service is highly scalable and is high performing.

Features

• AWs Supports the AWS Fartgate technology which handles the availability of containers.
• Compatible with Windows containers through Amazon Machine Image(AMI).
• Simplifies the local development through Amazon ECS CLI which is an open-source interface.
• Tasks can be defined via a declarative JSON template known as Task Definition.
• Container Auto-recovery.
• It provides 4 different types of network nodes for different use cases like Task networking/aws vpc, Bridge, Host, None, etc.
• Integrated with Elastic Load Balancing.
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs and alarms for monitoring and access control.

Pros

• Easy integration with other managed services present in Amazon cloud.
• Provides a good foundation for Continuous Deployment pipeline.
• Very flexible
• Ability to define a custom scheduler.
• Simplified interface
• Powerful platform

Cons

• Creating a load balancer service is quite challenging
• Capacity problems while deploying the new version of the Docker image.

5) LXC

This is an open source tool under the GNU LGPL License. It is available on the GitHub Repository.

This software is written in C, Python, Shell, and Lua.

Features

• It has a Linux kernel cgroups functionality that permits the limitation and prioritization of resources with no requirement to set off virtual machines.
• Namespace isolation functionality permits total isolation of the application’s view of the operating environment, comprising a network, UIDs, process trees and mounted file systems.
• The above two functionalities, LXC offers an isolated environment for applications.

Pros

• Powerful API
• Simple tools
• Open-source
• Of course, faster and cheaper than virtualization.
• High-density deployment of containers.

Cons

• Comparatively less secure than the other OS-level virtualization methods.
• Only Linux containers can be executed under LXC. No windows, Mac or other OS.

6) Container Linux by CoreOS

CoreOS Container Linux is an open source and lightweight operating system founded on the Linux Kernel and is designed to containerize your apps. It offers an infrastructure for easy clustered deployments while concentrating on automation, security, reliability, and scalability.

It comes under Apache License 2.0 and is available on the GitHub-CoreOS

Features

• Based on Gentoo Linux, Chrome OS, and Chromium OS via common SDK.
• Supports server hardware and use cases.
• Kernel type is Monolithic (Linux Kernel).
• Multiple isolated user-space instances for doing resource partitioning between containers.
• Employs e-build scripts for auto-compilation of system components.

Pros

• Open source.
• On-premises installation.
• Modern Linux kernel and automatic updates.
• The use of Quay adds to the security and ease of building & deploying new containers.
• Uses cloud-init in order to bootstrap CoreOS machines. It makes this software very simple and easy to work with.
• Each node knows about every other node via ECTD running by default.
• Allows you to interact with a remote cluster using fleetctl.
• The network mesh provided by flannel allows the CoreOS to run very smoothly.

Cons

• If the IP address changes for any reason, then you need to reconfigure the cluster.
• A lot of unit files make it difficult to manage.
• No resource awareness.
• Problems encountered after an auto-update.
• Does not provide any feedback about services.

7) Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure offers different container services.

Features

• Hybrid platform support.
• Deployment flexibility
• Fully managed container platform.
• Point and click publishing.
• Supports almost any programming language.
• DevOps and VSTS for CI/CD.
• Run on-premise or in the cloud.
• Open source Docker CLI.
• Application Insights and Log Analytics for getting a complete view of your containers.

Pros

• Easy setup
• Very Interactive CLI
• Very flexible – you can manage the underlying infrastructure using the tools of your choice.
• Highly scalable
• Simplified configurations
• Compatible with many Open sources client-side tools.

Cons

• Once deployed, upgrading Kubernetes nodes is quite difficult.
• Does not support hybrid operating systems – Windows and Linux cannot be integrated into a single container.

8) Google Cloud Platform

Google cloud provides you with different options to choose from for running the containers. These are Google Kubernetes Engine (for container cluster management), Google Compute Engine (for Virtual Machines and CI/CD pipeline) and Google App Engine Flexible Environment (for containers on fully-managed PaaS).

We have already discussed the Google Kubernetes Engine earlier in this article. We will now discuss the Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine Flexible Environment.

Features

Google Compute Engine

• VM instances
• Load balancing, auto-scaling, auto-healing, rolling updates, etc.
• Direct access to specialized hardware.
• No container Orchestration required.

Google App Engine Flexible Environment

• Fully-managed PaaS to execute the application in the single container.
• App Versioning and traffic splitting.
• In-built auto-scaling and load balancing.
• In-built support for micro services and SQL.

Pros

Google Compute Engine

• Easy to learn and simple to use web-based interface.
• Competitive Price.
• Identity and access management is very strong.
• Very fast VMs.

Google App Engine Flexible Environment

• It is hard to transition away from the Google cloud platform.
• Eliminates the need for manual server configuration.
• Integrates well with other GCP services.

Cons

Google Compute Engine

• Build-in monitoring through Stackdriver is a bit expensive.
• Initially, very low quotas (max computing units) are provided.
• Limited knowledge base and forums.

Google App Engine Flexible Environment

• It is hard to transition away from the Google cloud platform.
• Not very cost efficient.
• UI is a bit confusing.

9) Portainer

It is an open source lightweight container management User Interface that permits you to handle Docker Hosts or Swarm clusters. It supports Linux, Windows and OSX platforms. It comprises a single container which can be executed on any Docker engine.

Features

• Web UI to manage the Docker environment.
• Facilitates the use of templates for adding new nodes.
• The functionality of Portainer can be accessed in your own developed UI through an API.

Pros

• Open source
• Simple to install.
• Offers an API that can be employed to automate GUI tasks.
• Freely available by GitHub.

Cons

• Does not support Docker Versions prior to 1.9.
• No express or implied warranty of the software.

10) Apache Mesos

Developed by Apache Software Foundation, Apache Mesos is an open source project to handle computer clusters.

Version 1 of this software was released in 2016. It is written in C++ programming language and has Apache License 2.0. It employs Linux Cgroups technology in order to facilitate isolation for CPU, memory, I/O and file system.

Features

• Linear scalability.
• Fault tolerant simulated master and agents by means of Zookeeper.
• Non-disruptive upgrades.
• Pluggable isolation.
• Two-level scheduling: Cloud native and legacy applications can be executed in the same application.
• Uses HTTP APIs.
• Built-in Web UI.
• Cross-platform

Pros

• Open source
• Great abstraction for cluster resource management.
• Seamless integration with Apache Spark.
• Very neat C++ code base.
• Quite simple and easy to execute the master and slave process.
• Has many frameworks to execute a variety of tasks.
• Permits to encapsulate the execution environment within the containers.

Cons

• For deploying the distributed application on Mesos, you are required to use a framework to manage resource offers for it.
• Debugging a task with errors is difficult at times.
• The UI of this tool is not that good.