Containerization Best Practices

1. Containerization Best Practices

2. Best practices for migrating applications into containers Have a long-term vision A clear and long-term vision enables teams to focus on innovation and adopting best practices for the applications. Select the right migration strategy Often, teams containerize a monolithic application to achieve a “lift-and-shift” from an on-premises environment to a public cloud. But, it is better to ensure the proper selection. Consider decomposing part of older applications first There might be a more significant payoff in decomposing parts of older applications causing operational pain. Later, you can deploy these new services as containers without revamping the entire application.

3. Best practices for building containers A single application per container As the containers have the same lifecycle as the app, it hosts, each container should contain a single app. So, the app should work when a container starts and stop when the container stops. Consider starting with stateless applications A stateless backend eliminates the possibilities of long- running connections and mutable states and enables easy deployment of applications with zero downtime.

4. Best practices for building containers Optimize your builds for the build cache Containers like Docker caches the results of the first build of a Dockerfile, saving individual layers of the Docker images that can be reused in subsequent pipeline runs. Plan for monitoring from the start With a comprehensive approach to monitoring, you can have greater visibility into issues and events and remediate the problems before they can impact the users.

5. Best practices for creating container images Keep container images smaller and simpler Small images can quickly load into memory when starting services or containers and rapidly pull over the network. To keep the image size small, you should Begin with an appropriate base image. Use multistage builds so the final image won’t include all the libraries and dependencies. You can minimize the number of separate RUN commands in Dockerfile and decrease the number of layers in your image.

6. Best practices for creating container images Smartly tag your images Docker tags convey essential information regarding a specific image version/variant, helping manage different Docker image versions. Take advantage of Docker Registry or Hub With the container registry, you can: Firmly control your images’ storage location Completely own your images’ distribution pipeline Integrate image storage and distribution soundly into your in-house development workflow

7. Best practices for operating containers Use persistent data storage Instead, by storing your data in persistent volumes, you can ensure the size of the containers won’t grow with more data, and the stored data can be accessible by various containers. Employ CI/CD Adopting the CI/CD approach frees you from manual testing and redeploying everything. Empower with container orchestration tools Container orchestration tools can boost resilience by automatically restarting or scaling a container or cluster.

8. Best practices for ensuring container security Protect container runtime By scanning container runtime, you can know which container images are running in production and also view essential container information about image changes, metadata, and runtime vulnerabilities. Shift processes “to the left” The shift-left mentality can be applied to security, and it is best performed by starting early in the delivery pipeline. Create container security policies By establish container security policies, developers should be instantly notified with layer-specific details when a particular container image exceeds the risk threshold so that they can take direct action for rectification.

9. Unlock flexibility, portability, and much more with containers! The benefits of containers are plenty, from faster configurations to resource utilization, from application portability to efficient delivery cycle. However, the road to containerization has its fair share of lumps and holes. It may not be the right answer for every business. But if it is right for you, you’d need reliable partnership and relevant expertise to implement this revolutionary technology.

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