A quick introduction to the container ecosystem

If you’ve not been exposed to containers in your software landscape yet, then this is the introduction for you. I will try to keep it short since there are great resources on the internet if you wish to dive deep into the technology.

What are containers and why do we need them?

Containers are not a new idea. They have been around for many years in the Solaris, FreeBSD, and Unix operating systems as Solaris Zones, Jails, and Chroot, respectively. In the compute space, we have already experienced a lot of innovations that raise the technical maturity bar while abstracting the underlying complexity. We started with bare-metal servers, moved onto virtual machines for hardware-level virtualization, started using containers for software virtualization, and now have serverless technologies that abstract all of it away from the end user. However, in comparison to serverless technologies, containers are still heavily used due to the...