8 Things to Know About the Container Stack

As the container development model goes mainstream, the container stack itself is evolving. Now that businesses see the value in containers, development and business focus is moving away from the engine and toward adding more sophisticated capabilities for more direct benefit to the business. Indeed, in just a few short years, containers have moved from a technological “wild west” with no governance, competing technologies, and fractured communities to a more genteel, commoditized IT package, complete with standards driven by the cross-vendor Open Container Initiative.

At the most basic level, Linux containers allow companies to package and isolate applications with their entire runtime environment -- all of the files necessary to run. This makes it easy to move the containerized application among environments (dev, test, production, etc.) while retaining full functionality. Linux containers help reduce conflicts between development and operations teams by separating areas of responsibility. Developers can focus on their apps and operations can focus on the infrastructure.

Moreover, because Linux containers are based on open source technology, organizations get the latest and greatest advancement as soon as they’re available. Container technologies such as CRI-O, Kubernetes, and Docker help your team simplify, speed up, and orchestrate application development and deployment.

In fact, containers are at an evolutionary point in IT where they are ceasing to be the innovation; instead, they are becoming the platform for innovation. From composite applications and microservices to rapid application development and various permutations of DevOps, enterprise IT is now at another inflection point: Where do we go from here?

Here are eight things organizations and developers need to know now about the container stack and how it’s changing.

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