7 Reasons Why Containers are a Natural Fit for DevOps Teams

Here are seven reasons why container technology works well with DevOps environments, complementing their focus on rapid application development and agile IT.

One of the key benefits of containers is their ability to isolate application code and even whole infrastructure stacks at will. Using containers, ops teams can set up namespaces to keep test and production environments separate, even if they share the same kernel. Containers also ensure that only designated users have access to their contents, providing ops teams with complete control of their architecture.

Containers provide a way to package and execute resources together so the composition of apps and infrastructure is based on expected outcomes. By using smaller, more manageable tools called microservices, teams can achieve a high degree of composability and modularity when writing code or setting up IT resources. Containers allow the integration of composable, interchangeable parts that help ops teams support continuous delivery and updates without interrupting services or applications support.

When a new app needs to be created quickly, containers provide all the needed parts on demand, enabling developers to make quick updates and iterations in real time. Since developers move quickly, the ops support process must be equally fast. Ops teams need to test and evaluate multiple IT scenarios and be prepared to execute contingency plans rapidly. Containers allow ops to set up testing environments in cyber ranges and ensure a timely response to any problem throughout an app’s life cycle.

When multiple parties can access a container at the same time, developer, testing and production support teams can be kept up to date during a product’s life cycle. Containers ensure that everyone, including ops teams, can work in the same environment at the same time. This removes discrepancies between roles and ownership and ensures that what works on one node, can work on every node.

For ops teams, control of their IT environment is important for compliance. CIOs in particular must ensure end-to-end business compliance, and containers provide both high-level and granular control of their contents. Role-based access and container namespaces provide a way to treat application and infrastructure resources as a single entity, preventing unwanted access at the group and user level or by other applications and software.

IT ops professionals’ list of duties and responsibilities increases all the time. Containers help abstract many application dependencies and help automate some administrative and configuration tasks of development projects. Containers also can provide automation for other parts of a virtualized data center. Using the same method, ops teams can encapsulate storage, networking and compute resources in specialty containers to manage, deploy and share IT infrastructure between data centers.

Consistency in IT is paramount in maintaining business uptime and continuous operation. Using containers, ops teams can create contained environments that can be used to support failover. Containers provide the ability to create redundancy measures in IT infrastructure so environments don’t need to be reconfigured every time entire infrastructures need to be backed up. Containers also simplify idempotent operations—those that produce the same result if executed multiple times—to eliminate discrepancies and ensure uniformity.