Introducing the concept of containers

Moving on to more advanced and new technologies is what this chapter is focused on. In this chapter, our focus is on containers. Containers are not very new. The story of containers starts as early as 1979. Fast forward some years down the line to 2006, when Google launched the idea of process containers, which made it possible to isolate and limit hardware resources such as the CPU, memory, and disk to specific resources in the Linux operating system. In 2013, Docker was born, and this took containers to a whole new level and the adoption grew extremely fast. Now, small-, medium-, and large-scale organizations are finding ways to re-architect their systems to take advantage of the power and value of containers. There are different types of container runtimes, but Docker has stood out to be the most used.

Containers are designed to make application deployment, release, versioning, and scaling much easier and faster. This is possible due to the...