Containers in the network engineering field

Container technologies are transforming how infrastructure is built in modern days. We now have an additional layer of abstraction we can use to overcome limitations on physical space, power, cooling, and other factors. This is especially true of the need to move toward more environmentally-friendly data centers.

There are many new challenges and opportunities associated with the new container-based world:

• Networking in the container world. As we saw in the last section, there are lots of options that exist when it comes to networking in containers.
• DevOps. One of the challenges when trying to implement DevOps practices in network engineering is the lack of options for flexible, virtualized network devices. Containers can potentially solve that problem if we can virtualize our network along with the hosts.
• Lab and Testing. If we can virtualize our network via container images, this makes lab and testing much...