Fast, Portable and Secure.
Containerization is a technology that is taking the IT world by storm! It’s no surprise considering the considerable benefits of shifting to a container based deployment.
Today we’ll be discussing the top benefits of containers, and why you might want to consider containers for your next web app. Let’s dig in!
Containers Are Lightweight
Compared to virtual machines (VMs), containers are significantly lighter on server resource usage. This is because unlike VMs, containers share the host operating system, and thus containers do not have operating systems of their own. Consider the following graphic to visualize resource usage across a typical 2-app (web/database) deployment scenario:

Containers Are Fast
Being lightweight and not having an operating system means that containers are able to start and stop much faster than traditional VMs. In many cases, it can take seconds to start a container, compared to minutes to start a VM. There is no operating system to boot, so your app starts loading immediately.Containers Are Secure
Containers are built on the concept of “namespaces”. Much like a traditional VMs, this essentially means that your apps are sandboxed, and not able to communicate with each other, (unless of course, you want them to!) This concept can be leveraged to help keep your apps secure and, data is only exposed between apps as you choose. Unlike a traditional dedicated server that might have a full LAMP stack running, it is common practice for each container to only provide a single service, so this can really help mitigate damage in the event of an attack.Containers Are Developer Friendly
With containers, your developers are able to use the same environment for both development and production. This is a common stumbling block in web app development. Your developer may write an app on their Mac laptop, only to find that it doesn’t run on their Windows workstation. With containers, the image they build locally can be the same image that is run in production. How many times have you ran into a bug and heard, “that’s weird, it worked fine on my machine”? Combined with proper workflow, containers can help minimize these types of issues. Additionally, container building workflows lend themselves exceptionally well to CI/CD pipeline integrations. These advantages help your developers become more productive and efficient.