Application Containers Gaining Momentum in the Technology Industry

Container technology is playing a crucial role in the process of software development and is bringing a major change in the cloud-computing world. It mainly helps with portability. An application along with its runtime environment is wrapped in a container which allows one to easily and reliably run applications on various platforms such as a desktop, servers, public or private clouds, etc. The complete runtime environment includes the application with its dependencies, files, libraries, and other files needed to run it. This portability offered by application containers allows enterprises to accelerate the development process and switch to another cloud environment very easily. Another benefit of the technology is that it runs independently, i.e., if one application stops working, it does not affect the working of other containers with the same application.

Companies are adopting container technology at an explosive rate. For instance, the software firm, Red Hat Software recently announced the 1.0 release of its open-source Podman project which provides a fully featured container engine and allows companies to run containers securely. The company also formed an alliance with several cloud technology enterprises to launch a hub for Kubernetes operators.

Red Hat Unveils Open-source Podman Project

The 1.0 release of Red Hat’s open-source Podman project features integrated multiple core security capabilities to allow companies to run containers securely. The security features include rootless containers and enhanced user namespace support for better container isolation. Containers allow enterprises to implement applications in a virtualized way on top of an existing operating system. Scott McCarty, product manager of containers at Red Hat, said, “We felt the sum of its features as well as the project's performance, security, and stability made it reasonable to move to 1.0. Since Podman is set to be the default container engine for the single-node use case in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, we wanted to make some pledges about its supportability.”

Cloud Giants Launch Kubernetes Hub

The expansion of Kubernetes ecosystem continues with the launch of a Kubernetes-focused online marketplace called ‘OperatorHub.io’ that serves as a way to automate infrastructure and application management tasks using Kubernetes as the automation engine. It provides automation workflows to simplify the job of running the technology. OperatorHub.io was created by Red Hat along with its partnership with cloud leaders Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft. Kubernetes is the framework for packaging, deploying, and managing software containers, a standard unit of software that packages all its dependencies, so the application runs smoothly. According to Red Hat, with the launch of OperatorHub.io, they wish to continue to work across the industry to allow the creation of more operators.

The Market

The application container industry is witnessing a steady growth in recent years. Driving the market are the factors including growing adoption of a cloud-based computing system in organizations, rising adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) among end users, and growing popularity of application container technology over virtual machines.

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