An overview of containers

Containers are an evolution of virtualization. With containers, we virtualize applications instead of machines. To share resources, we can leverage virtual or physical machines. A container contains everything that is required for the containerized app to run, including an OS.

Containers can help us set up environments, ensure the correctness of applications when moving them between environments (local, staging, and production), and more. By packaging everything into a single container image, our application becomes more portable than ever before; no more “it was working on my machine.” Another perk of containers is the possibility to configure the networking and relationships between containers. Moreover, containers are lightweight, allowing us to create a new one in a matter of seconds, leading to on-demand provisioning of resources that can scale up with traffic spikes, then scale back down when the demand decreases.

Containers can...