Containers have been around for several years now and have become an essential part of many businesses. Containers are popular because they are easy to set up, secure, and scalable—allowing companies to handle their workloads as efficiently as possible. But what does the future hold for containers? What trends should you be watching out for? At this point in time we can only speculate, but here are some of the most compelling trends we see coming down the pipeline:
The Future of Containers
The future of containers is bright. While the current trend with container usage is to focus on microservices, there are many other new advancements that will help make your business more efficient in the coming years.
Container Orchestration: This involves automating container deployment and scaling across multiple environments using a single command line tool or API interface. This can be done through automation tools like Kubernetes or RancherOS (or both).
Container Monitoring: Tools that monitor your containers’ health from within the OS itself can help you troubleshoot issues faster than traditional monitoring solutions such as Jaeger-Agent.
What are Container Technologies?
Containers are a way to package software with all of its dependencies, so it can be shipped and run on any infrastructure. The containerization process involves grouping the application and its dependencies (like libraries or other services) into one package called a container image.
Container technology is a method of packaging an application so it can be run with isolated dependencies, and they have fundamentally altered the development of software today due to their compartmentalization of a computer system.
The most convenient way to think about containers is as a virtual machine. They allow you to set up an environment for your software, which exists in its own little bubble, and then you can run that software on any computer that has the same operating system and dependencies as your container.
Containers are also very useful for running multiple versions of the same application at once—you could, for example, have two different versions of PHP installed at once and use them both simultaneously in separate containers.
Here are some of the top trends that will dominate the container landscape in 2023:
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Kubernetes users will leverage more cloud-managed services:
Cloud-managed services are more popular than ever. Kubernetes is the leading container orchestration platform, and support for it is growing. If you run Kubernetes, you need to be able to manage it. And cloud-managed services can provide high availability, scale as needed and offer more flexibility than on-premise tools. Furthermore, they typically offer advanced features such as:
- Support for multiple clouds (AWS, Azure) or hybrid environments
- Monitoring and alerting tools that fit into your current workflow
- An easy way to scale up CPU/memory or add additional nodes
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Amazon ECS users shifting to AWS Fargate:
You will see more AWS Fargate users in 2023.
Amazon ECS users are shifting to AWS Fargate. AWS Fargate is a service that lets you run containers without provisioning or managing servers. It’s a fully managed service, which means that all the heavy lifting is done for you, so it’s a cost-effective way to run containers on demand. AWS Fargate makes it easy for organizations everywhere to use containers in the cloud at scale and maintain high availability across their applications. You can even set up auto scaling rules for your application's pods.
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Pod count per organisation will keep doubling:
The number of containers per organisation has doubled. If you are wondering what all this means, then don't worry; I'm here to help.
Container: A container is an isolated process that runs on a single machine. Containers do not have direct access to the hardware or other resources, so they can be run in a secure manner on any machine that supports them.
Pod: A pod is a group of containers running together as one unit. Pod management operations are performed via a control loop that ensures each pod has the necessary resources and communicates with other pods when needed (for example, if one container needs data from another).
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Organizations with container environments will leverage more monitors:
Container environments are complex and require monitoring to ensure the health of their components. Without proper monitoring, container environments can become insecure or inefficient, which could lead to costly outages.
Monitoring also helps organizations maintain a secure environment by detecting if there is any malicious activity in their containers. For example, if an attacker were able to gain control over a container and modify its configuration files or data during runtime (which is common), this could compromise other applications running inside that same container—leading them down an untenable path toward failure.
Finally, monitoring helps organizations scale efficiently because it allows them to identify issues before they become serious problems for users who depend on these services for business operations every day (for example: “Why does my website keep crashing?”).
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Organizations will have to migrate from Docker to Containers:
If you are running containers in production today, Docker is likely a part of that. It’s been the most popular container runtime for many years, but it has some drawbacks. As Docker has matured, its weaknesses have become more apparent and organizations will need to migrate away from it if they want to take advantage of more advanced features like security and scalability.
Developers often choose Docker because they don't want to be locked into a particular vendor's stack—it allows them to use language-specific tools (like Docker Compose) and manage their own images or use public ones from registries like Docker Hub or Quay Enterprise (now Harbor). But this also means that developers are responsible for managing the underlying infrastructure themselves—something that can be challenging given the complexity of modern data centers and cloud environments.
In fact, developers should never be given full control over a production environment because it's too easy for them to make mistakes when making changes on their own without proper oversight from IT professionals who understand how things work behind-the-scenes at scale—especially when dealing with security threats such as Heartbleed which was discovered by accident during maintenance work by Red Hat engineers while working on OpenSSL software used by many websites around the world!
What are the popular containers?
Docker is the most popular container runtime. This is due to its ecosystem, which enables developers and system administrators to build, ship and run containers efficiently. It also provides a standard format for packaging applications. Docker supports multiple operating systems including Linux, Windows Server, macOS and IBM Z. It also supports various architectures such as x86-64bit (amd64), ARMv8 64-bit little endian (arm64le), ppc64 64-bit little endian (ppc64le) and s390x 64-bit little endian (s390x).
RKT is another open source container runtime that utilizes the App Container Specification (appc) for building containers instead of Dockerfiles like Docker does. RKT can be used on any Linux distribution as well as MacOS X 10.12+.
AppC is an open source specification from CoreOS that defines a standard interface between applications running in individual containers without requiring them to be aware of what operating system they're running on or how they were built - just like conventional library dependencies would allow programs written in different programming languages or frameworks talk to each other without needing any code modifications on either side! AppC builds upon existing standards such as OCI Image Format Specification v2; however it adds additional metadata such as commands needed before starting an application image inside an AppC image file.
RunC is a software that creates and runs containers according to OCI (Open Container Initiative). It takes a command line argument for an image manifest which describes how containers should be run by specifying environment variables, user IDs, process IDs, etc.. RunC then takes this information given by users on the command line such as "--user=$UID" or "--env=foo=bar".
Containers will keep on dominating the app business and all efforts should be made to adopt these top trends.
Containers are the future, and if you haven’t heard of them yet, you should. Containers are a type of application packaging which makes it easy to deploy and run applications anywhere. This means that containers can be run in the cloud, on-premises or on mobile devices.
Containers have been around since 2004 but they only reached their full potential when Docker came along with its container runtime engine called Docker Engine. With the advent of Kubernetes, many companies have decided to adopt containers as their primary technology for deploying and running applications in production environments because they offer higher flexibility than virtual machines (VMs). VMs were popular for a long time because they were easier to use but eventually lost popularity due to security concerns associated with having multiple operating systems running on one physical server hardware.
Recommended best practices to adopt for container operations:
By adopting the following best practices, you will be able to maximize your container operations and make them more secure:
- Use a container orchestrator.
- Use container management tools.
- Use container security tools.
- Use container monitoring tools. Use container log management tools.
- Use container performance monitoring tools. It’s also recommended that you run these applications in containers themselves to ensure high availability and scalability needs are met on demand without additional hardware or software costs associated with this process being present in production environments where it may not be necessary for all time periods at once (e.g., during normal business hours).
Container Trends Conclusion
These are the main trends we think you should watch out for in this year. They are not only relevant for containers, but also other types of applications that require cloud-native deployment. There is a lot of hype around this topic and new technologies come and go every day. However, these trends have been around for quite some time now and seem to be here to stay. In order to build modern applications with great user experiences, you need to follow these guidelines when building your containerized infrastructure so you can take advantage of all the benefits they provide while avoiding pitfalls along the way.