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Containers: Docker

Deploy Docker Open Source, or Enterprise for High Performing Systems

Looking to modernize systems and process with container technology, but not sure how to start or where the best ROI is?

 

Docker is an open platform for helping developers and systems administrators build, ship and run distributed applications anywhere. Organizations using Docker are able to ship applications faster and dynamically update and scale these applications while gaining seamless portability of applications across environments.

 

Flux7 Docker consulting services help IT teams to adopt container strategies where they provide the most ROI. Experience deploying Docker containers in the enterprise and with a variety of use cases means a higher probability of project success.

Docker consulting services

Key Docker Use Cases

Simplifying Configuration

The primary use case for Docker is simplifying configuration. VMs are known for their ability to run any platform with its own config on top of your infrastructure. Docker provides this same capability without the overhead of a virtual machine. It lets you put your environment and configuration into code and deploy it. The same Docker configuration can also be used in a variety of environments. This decouples infrastructure requirements from the application environment.

Code Pipeline Management

As code travels from the developer’s machine to production, it has to go through different environments, each with minor differences. Docker provides a consistent environment for the application from dev through production, easing the code development and deployment pipeline. The immutable nature of Docker images, and the ease with which they can be spun up, help you achieve zero change in application runtime environments across dev through production.

Rapid Deployment

Docker, by creating just a container for the process and not booting up an OS, brings resource provisioning down to seconds. Create and destroy resources in your data center without worrying about the cost of bringing it up again. The immutable nature of Docker images gives you the peace of mind that things will work exactly the way they have been working and are supposed to work.

Server Consolidation

Just like using VMs for consolidating multiple applications, the application isolation abilities of Docker allows consolidating multiple servers to save on cost. However, without the memory footprint of multiple OSes and the ability to share unused memory across the instances, Docker provides far denser server consolidation than you can get with VMs.

Debugging Capabilities

Docker provides many tools that are not necessarily specific to containers, but, they work well with the concept of containers. This includes the ability to checkpoint containers and container versions, as well as to diff two containers. This can be immensely useful in fixing an application. A website run inside a Docker container, for example, provides the ability to quickly create a dev environment to debug in a sandbox.

Application Isolation

Running multiple applications on the same machine can provide benefits of server consolidation for decreasing cost or a gradual plan to separate a monolithic application into decoupled pieces. It is common, for example, to need to run two REST API servers, each of which uses slightly different versions of flask, and other such dependencies. Running these API servers under different containers provides an easy way out through “dependency hell.”

Multi Tenancy

Using Docker to enable multi-tenant applications avoids major application rewrites. Using Docker, it is easy and inexpensive to create isolated environments for running multiple instances of app tiers for each tenant. Docker’s easy-to-use API can be used to spin up containers programmatically. Docker-py, a Python library is implemented to help interact with the Docker daemon through a web application interface.

Docker for Development Productivity

To provide a fast feedback loop, Docker’s shared volumes are used to make the application code available to the container from the container’s host OS, a VirtualBox VM (typically, a Vagrant box). This approach means developers can edit the source code from his platform (Windows, Mac or Linux) and is able to see the changes right away as the applications run using the same source code with the running environment set inside of the Vagrant box using Docker containers.

What is Docker Used For In Innovative Organizations?

Retailer Adopts Docker Based Microservices

Read how a container-based cloud environment helps facilitate automation, provide an immutable environment and encourage greater development innovation.

Read & Download the Case Study

Accelerate Innovation and Code Quality

Read how a container-based cloud environment helps facilitate automation and provides an immutable environment and encourages development and innovation.

Read & Download the Whitepaper