What is Containerization?

Containerization serves in the form of a lightweight option to machine virtualization which involves summarizing an application in any container with its very own operating surroundings. The procedure offers the advantages of loading a particular application on a machine since the application can easily be run on any specific machine without any kind of worries regarding dependencies. Recently, containerization has gained huge popularity.

Brief Explanation of the Term

Containerization or container-based virtualization is also called application containerization. It is basically an OS-level virtualization procedure for using and operating distributed applications without the launch of virtual machines for different applications. Perhaps, a number of isolated systems known as containers are used on single control hosts accessing single kernels. Since different containers share similar OS kernels as host, containers can serve to be more efficient in comparison to virtual machines that need separate OS instances.  Different containers used in this procedure hold all the necessary components required for running a desired software like environment variables, libraries and files. Host OS constrains the access of the container to certain physical resources like memory and Central Processing Unit. This way a single container is not able to consume all the physical resources of the host.

The Benefits of Containerization

Containerization gained huge popularity with Docker- an open source that developed the procedure of giving containers improved portability. This allowed the containers to move about in almost any system that deals in sharing host OS type without the need of code changes. Containerization helps in the gain of efficiency for storage, memory and CPU in comparison to traditional virtualization. Containers do not require overheads as needed by virtual machines and therefore it is always possible to support more containers using similar infrastructure. This way containerization helps in improving performance since there is one single OS that takes care of the hardware calls.