What is Containerization Technology and How It Works?

We’re living in an increasingly digitized and virtual world, where companies are bringing more of their operations into a flexible, and scal...

We’re living in an increasingly digitized and virtual world, where companies are bringing more of their operations into a flexible, and scalable cloud environment. Part of this migration for many business leaders involves learning how to understand new terms they may not have encountered before, like virtual machines and containerization. Containerization is a kind of virtualization of an operating system.

With this technology, it’s possible for companies to run applications in isolated spaces, referred to as containers. The applications all access the same shared system for operations, but the container is fully packaged, portable, and ready for the cloud landscape. Today, we’re going to give you a basic introduction into containerization and how it works to transform the business ecosystem as we know it today. 

Defining Containerization: The Basics

So what is containerization when it comes to your business? It is a form of virtualization for your business OS which involves running applications in isolated digital environments called containers. The container in this space will be a fully packaged and portable environment for computing which contains everything an application needs to run, including libraries, binaries, configuration files, and other dependencies. 

The container in the landscape is abstracted from the host OS, giving limited access to resources underneath. This is very similar to using a basic lightweight virtual machine. The result is an application which companies can essentially run on a wide range of ecosystems and infrastructures. For instance, you can access the application in VMs, on bare metal, in the cloud and more, all without having to reconfigure the entire system to suit the environment. 

The simplicity of containerization makes it a powerful tool in the modern digital world today. There’s generally less overhead involved during the use of a container, and there’s no requirement to set up separate operating systems for each application, because every container shares the same OS environment. The high-efficiency nature of the design makes it ideal for packaging many microservices in modern applications.

An Insight into Containerization: How it Works?

The concept of containerization might seem complicated at first, but it’s much simpler than it seems. Each container in an ecosystem is a package of executable software information, often running on top of a hosting operating system. The host might support a lot of different containers concurrently, such is the case for a lot of microservices architecture environments. 

To understand how containerization works, it’s best to see the concept in layers. At the top of the pile are all the libraries and binaries required for the application, and the technology for the app itself, running in an isolated space or container. Underneath that, you’ll find the container engine and the guest operating system which is specific to the containerization solution being used. Underneath that, you have the host operating system, and the system serving as a bridge between the operating system software and the underlying hardware system. Finally, at the very bottom of the pile, the hardware for the infrastructure is last, including network interfaces, disk management and storage, and the CPU.