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