Your Tech Inside Quick Guide To Containerized Application Development

Development and operations are definitely synergized in today’s digital era. Collaboration and automation have taken priority among DevOps professionals with businesses ensuring their DevOps teams have the tools and processes to be efficient and successful. 

“The intention of DevOps is to create better-quality software more quickly and with more reliability while inviting greater communication and collaboration between teams,” Samarpit Tuli explained in a DZone article.

Part of this collaborative effort in the space of software development automation is containerized applications. Containers have streamlined processes in development and operations, with DevOps teams popularizing platforms like Docker. The following tech inside quick guide to containerized application development will dive a bit deeper into containers, DevOps, and processes. Let’s get started.

The working anatomy of containers

There needs to be a few critical parts in place for a software application to use containers. Each step is important throughout the development process, since an issue at any point can slow development and time to market. This could hurt the ROI of your software development project in a big time way. The lifecycle for a containerized application is: 

• The application code and container blueprint is created in the same code base, also known as a Docker file.
• If the code and blueprint is changed for that application, a new container image is built.
• The container image is stored in a private docker registry for automated management. 

Once a new version of the application is made, or an update is needed, a new container is created and stored. Then deployment can be automated to ensure a streamlined process throughout the application lifecycle.

Containerized application deployment made easy

Deploying a containerized application, and the process needed to do so successfully, is vital to DevOps professionals. This is something that a large software company or big data company can utilize for maximum time and money efficiency. 

First, you need to examine the container clusters in the software, and have the container orchestrator defined in the DevOps team. The container orchestrator will deal with deploying container images to the clusters, grabbing the container from the registry for provision. It could be managing ten containers, or thousands. 

Making an orchestrator’s tasks as streamlined as possible will go a long way when dealing with thousands of containers. This could be why most businesses are actively seeking to employ more full-time DevOps experts. To simplify software development at scale. 

Taking the needed steps toward containerized application deployment

Containerized applications are lightweight, free of clunky virtual machine attribute alternatives. This is what makes containers so great, and so widely used by DevOps teams around the world. For scalable and portable app deployment, you pretty much need to use containers.

Utilizing containers is certainly valuable. They affect operations on multiple levels, making overall development cost-effective and innovative. And building those containers is a must in the development environment.

For example, you need to rebuild a container everytime a blueprint changes. If this is not done, the code may be pushed to the development environment and problems could quickly occur, causing bugs and crashes. However, when the process is set up using container images via Docker and a private Docker registry, a container orchestrator can easily fulfill requirements and deploy the apps using automated processes.

The orchestrator and app deployment

The orchestrator needs to ensure instance of a container image, internal networking rules for complete container compatibility, Life cycle and cluster node management, the number of containers needed and in use, and a full understanding of resource management.

This is what makes an expert container orchestrator valuable. He or she can assess and assign tasks, based on needs to other members of the DevOps team, as well as have tasks automated via multiple CI/CD environments for different projects.

“A mature CI/CD practice has the option of implementing continuous deployment where application changes run through the CI/CD pipeline and passing builds are deployed directly to production environments,” Isaac Sacolick of InfoWorld explained. “Teams practicing continuous delivery elect to deploy to production on a daily or even hourly schedule, though continuous delivery isn’t always the optimal for every business application.”

In conclusion . . . 

Containerized applications certainly have benefits for DevOps in a number of processes. From planning to deployment, there is a reason why so many developers and ops experts are utilizing containers in all software development projects. Keeping your thumb on the pulse of new development tools is a must. Are you using containers to automate your projects? We want to hear from you.