What Are Containers and Why Should I Use Them?
This first chapter will introduce you to the world of containers and their orchestration. This book starts from the very beginning, in that it assumes that you have no prior knowledge of containers, and will give you a very practical introduction to the topic.
In this chapter, we will focus on the software supply chain and the friction within it. Then, we'll present containers, which are used to reduce this friction and add enterprise-grade security on top of it. We'll also look into how containers and the ecosystem around them are assembled. We'll specifically point out the distinction between the upstream Open Source Software (OSS) components, united under the code name Moby, that form the building blocks of the downstream products of Docker and other vendors.
The chapter covers the following topics...
What are containers?
A software container is a pretty abstract thing, so it might help if we start with an analogy that should be pretty familiar to most of you. The analogy is a shipping container in the transportation industry. Throughout history, people have been transporting goods from one location to another by various means. Before the invention of the wheel, goods would most probably have been transported in bags, baskets, or chests on the shoulders of the humans themselves, or they might have used animals such as donkeys, camels, or elephants to transport them.
With the invention of the wheel, transportation became a bit more efficient as humans built roads that they could move their carts along. Many more goods could be transported at a time. When the first steam-driven machines, and later gasoline-driven engines, were introduced...
Why are containers important?
These days, the time between new releases of an application become shorter and shorter, yet the software itself doesn't become any simpler. On the contrary, software projects increase in complexity. Thus, we need a way to tame the beast and simplify the software supply chain.
Also, every day, we hear that cyber-attacks are on the rise. Many well-known companies are and have been affected by security breaches. Highly sensitive customer data gets stolen during such events, such as social security numbers, credit card information, and more. But not only customer data is compromised – sensitive company secrets are stolen too.
Containers can help in many ways. First of all, Gartner found that applications running in a container are more secure than their counterparts not running in a container. Containers...