Today, a majority of businesses include technology in some way. Whether it be using simple computing or running mission critical and cloud native workloads. It has been still recent that Cloud computing came along and brought about the benefits of offloading customers from on-premise to a cloud environment, and reduce operation costs as well as achieve flexible scaling. Being able to enjoy virtualisation by having bare metal servers of virtual servers on the cloud was great. However we are seeing the next set of digital transformation with containerisation.

In fact, containers are not very new. It first emerged around 2013, but why it is so important today (written on 2021) is because the practicality of it caught up. It is no longer on beta, it has very much matured and brought a lot of business value today.

The core of it is that it can abstract away the host operating system, which means the workload can be run anywhere instead of depending on the underlying OS. Just like a nice all-in-one neatly package container in a cargo ship, it can be provisioned or moved anywhere.

So what does all of this mean? It means businesses can remove large monolithic workloads and replace it to groups of smaller microservices, which allows each smaller pieces to be easily replaceable with less downtime instead of having any maintenance on the monolithic application affect everything in the business.

This improves the agility and works very well with the devops work style, hence productivity will also increase.

There are already many ways businesses can achieve a containerised architecture. Openshift is one. I do have a separate tech blog on openshift so feel free to check it out.