Containers & Dockers – Factors that Contributed their Popularity

Docker doesn’t need an introduction. By now Docker & containers have become a common term due to their immense popularity. But do you know what has led to the widespread use of these technologies? Well, here are some of the driving factors that have contributed to the tremendous interest in Dockers.

Organizations today are looking for an easy way to establish an online presence. Docker web hosting lets you think beyond cPanel hosting and Plesk hosting. On one hand where traditional web hosting requires the customer to have knowledge about server management concepts; Docker has risen due to the demand for specialized hosting blended with simplicity.

It is a new wave of demand where SMB’s look for specialized hosting solutions such as WordPress hosting, Magento hosting, etc.

Before we dive in deeper about “What is Docker?” - let me tell you that Docker isn’t the first and exclusive only container platform. OpenVZ and LXC and similar frameworks were available in the mid-2000s. FreeBSD jails and other container technologies go back even further.

Docker was born in 2013. At that budding stage the young technology was too petite as compared to most of today's mainstream enterprise technologies.

Gradually, Docker rose and gained huge prominence over the past years leaving behind the prominent technologies. Now, here rises the curiosity of what made the containers become so popular and why have containers succeeded so spectacularly when the alternative container frameworks showed a little adoption. 

Factors that Contributed to the Popularity of Containers

Following are the two factors that tell us why Containers have become popular –

Containers have proven quite appealing to large as well as small companies or organizations over the past years. They start and stop quickly as compared to virtual machines. They are more portable. Container host environments are very consistent no matter the type of operating system which is hosting them. Easy scalability is another pro of the containerized applications as they can be added or subtracted quickly from an environment. In addition, you can easily break complex monolithic apps into smaller modular micro services using containers.

Why Dockers are so Tremendously Popular?

So, the question - why Docker specifically has become so popular? Although this question is a bit difficult to answer, here are following factors that have contributed -

It is an open source technology. By 2013, it was the beginning when open source interest was quite intense among the people. (If Docker would have emerged five years earlier, when commercial interest in open source was not that intense, it is difficult to say that being open source would have helped it much.)

The rise of Docker was planned at the right time (2013) when virtual machines were finally becoming a dated technology. Docker happened to fit the bill when Companies were looking for a leaner, meaner way of deploying applications.

The technologies like OpenVZ and LXC that appeared in the mid-2000s, container frameworks were less appealing as traditional virtualization had not yet run its course.

DevOps was popular in the early 2010s due to its emphasis on agility, flexibility and scalability in software delivery. Another impressive thing to note was that Docker coincided with the DevOps revolution. Docker containers provided an excellent building block for software delivery pipelines creation and deploying applications according to DevOps prescripts.

Key Benefits of Docker

Following are some of the major benefits of using this over-growing platform. Although the list is long, we have highlighted the major ones - 

• Continuous Deployment and Testing
• Portability
• Ensures consistency across multiple development and release cycles, standardizing your environment
• Isolation of applications and resources
• Security

So, you have seen how Docker aids in building application hosting solutions that stands up to new age challenges without the need to learn the ropes.