Introduction to containers

Containers are referred to as operating system–level virtualization systems. They are hosted on an operating system running either on a physical server or a virtual server. The nature of the implementation depends on the host operating system. For example, Linux containers are inspired by cgroups; on the other hand, Windows containers are almost lightweight virtual machines with a small footprint.

Containers are truly cross-platform. Containerized applications can run on any platform, such as Linux, Windows, or Mac, uniformly without any changes being needed, which makes them highly portable. This makes them a perfect technology for organizations to adopt as they are platform-agnostic.

In addition, containers can run in any cloud environment or on-premises environment without changes being needed. This means that organizations are also not tied to a single cloud provider if they implement containers as their hosting platform on the cloud. They...