The benefits of containers
We have already considered the many benefits of containers over VMs. This section will explain the overall benefits of containers beyond the benefits of VMs:
Self-contained: Containers package the essential application binaries and their dependencies together to make sure that there is no disparity between different environments such as development, testing, or production. This promotes the concept of Twelve-Factor applications and that of immutable containers. Spring Boot microservices bundle all the required application dependencies. Containers stretch this boundary further by embedding JRE and other operating system-level libraries, configurations, and so on, if there are any.
Lightweight: Containers, in general, are smaller in size with a lighter footprint. The smallest container, Alpine, has a size of less than 5 MB. The simplest Spring Boot microservice packaged with an Alpine container with Java 8 would only come to around 170 MB in size. Though the size...
