Containers & Microservices Changing the Application Execution Strategy

To survive in today’s economy, organizations need an architecture and development process resembling factory assembly lines that are highly efficient. In response to these demands, organizations have long moved from traditional solution architecture to Microservices – the emerging platform for applications. The move brings with it an advantage of having an architecture that enables agile development, rolling out digital services faster than usual. Read more about achieving independent service delivery with Microservices Architecture here. Along with this has emerged the importance of running them in containers.

Microservices app that runs in containers benefits software development by assisting in agile development. Containers assist in enabling the scalability and availability of Microservices. They serve as lightweight cocoons improving the portability of the software. The separation and rapid provisioning of containers from the underlying operating layer make them the best fit for Microservices dynamics.

Containers + Microservices = Agile Development + Improved DevOps

Benefits of moving to containers for Microservices app.

Efficient execution environment  

From an efficiency standpoint, containers are the best as they carry out execution isolation at the level of the operating system instance. One operating system can support numerous containers. Each runs within its execution environment. The advantage of running numerous components on a single OS is – overhead gets reduced drastically as a lot of processing power is freed up for application components.

Better coexistence of multiple components     

Multiple execution environments can exist on a single OS platform with the use of containers.  The use of containers and its efficiency leads to the higher utilization rate of the server. Multiple microservices can be placed on a single server and the use of control group functionality, if required, takes care that one service does not interfere with the other.

However, a word of advice – To increase resiliency, make sure that microservices are run in a redundant configuration. They should not be run on the same physical server in adjacent containers as this affects redundancy. The use of a container management system (Kubernetes) might help you in container placement.

Efficient initialization and faster execution 

The lightweight nature of containers makes it a natural fit for microservices apps. Containers being smaller in size tend to respond well to highly erratic workloads that microservices apps usually experience. The operating system spin-up time of containers is minimal; they require seconds or at times even milliseconds to start, and hence initialization is significantly faster and efficient. Execution is faster as well making them a better fit for policy-based microservices operations environments.

Containers and Microservices together can thus benefit the software development cycle.

Running microservices apps in containers encourages faster integrations and better team engagement, leading to agile development. The release cycles get shorter, and the time-to-market is faster, thus offering improved user experience and quality software. DevOps processes are taken to an entirely different level with container-based microservices. Organizations can offer superior software capabilities and services and at the same time improve their ROI with efficient revenue-generating applications.

Using containers for microservices apps is the modern approach to build efficiently scalable as well as manageable web applications. Tune your strategy to include container-based Microservices with DevOps methodology to bring in a positive impact on your customers or your brand’s reputation.