Whether a startup or a large corporation, employing containerization technology can provide significant advantages in terms of agility, portability, flexibility, and speed. Here are some examples from the real world of how containers are used in various business use cases.

1. Containerization Use Cases

2. Table of Contents
2
What is a container?
I
Containerization use cases for startups
II
Containerization use cases for medium-sized enterprises
III
Containerization use cases for big enterprises
IV
Tech superpowers using containers
V
Other general use cases of containers
VI

3. 2
An application must work the same as intended in development, test,
and production environments to be successful.
That can be pretty difficult as every environment has its own
configurations and sets of supporting files.
Containers solve the problem by carrying all the necessary information
in a single container image to run in isolated user environments.
WHAT IS A CONTAINER?

4. 2
Building consistency in environments
A well-documented and consistent environment makes it easy to
identify the problems and keep track of the application.
Infrastructure and environment isolation
If maintaining security is a crucial requirement for a startup, it can build
separate containers for each component and avoid conflicting
dependencies.
Implementation of different strategies
With a container up and running in seconds, startups do not have to
wait for a VM to boot up the OS and thus, can easily implement
different strategies.
Containerization use cases for startups

5. 2
It does not have a system administrator, and the application is
complex
The application requires high storage
Looking for cross-platform development
Beta Labs strongly advocates Docker because the installation of the
Docker desktop managed everything for it while they could concentrate
on the coding part.
Handling top-level architecture became easier with the declarative
nature of the tools that provided a simple description of how runtime
components talk to each other.
The startup appreciates Docker for allowing them to package their
application together with exactly the kind of environment they wanted.
However, startups should avoid using containers when
How adopting a container-friendly architecture helped
Beta Labs?

6. 2
Cloud migrations and bringing agility to on-prem organizations
Migrating to a cloud platform down the line will be an easy transition as
containers run the same way no matter where you host them.
Supporting continuous operations with no downtime
Container architecture is inherently beneficial in continuous operations
as it provides a standardized way to divide applications into separate
containers.
As a result, you can place containers on different physical or virtual
machines, on-premises, or in the cloud.
Containerization use cases for medium-sized enterprises

7. 2
Containerization of legacy applications
The main reasons for containerizing legacy applications are the need to have
portability, scaling, and the ability to respond quickly.
Increased developer’s productivity
If a developer wants to test an early stage of an application, they can execute it
from their PC without hosting on the main OS, without setting a complete
testing environment.
Building containers into the DevOps process
Without containers, build, release, and test pipelines will have a more complex
configuration to achieve DevOps continuity.
Containers and IoT
Enterprise IoT solutions are getting matured rapidly, both in size and scope as
the adoption is becoming easier, due to the cost of sensors continuing to
reduce while the power of edge and cloud computing consistently increases.
Containerization use cases for big enterprises

8. 2
Cornell University wanted to have the ability to track the changes
they made and ensure that the environment was supportable in the
future.
Docker helped supercharge their efforts.
The University leveraged Dockerfiles to create a reproducible
infrastructure and coupled them with Puppet to create instance-
specific images.
They implemented a series of base images to build on and rebuild
them with the latest patches on a daily basis.
How did Cornell University containerize its administrative
application?

9. 2
After going into production with Docker Containers-as-a-Service
architecture, they soon saw a 10x increase in scalability.
Visa wanted new developers to be able to deploy code on their first
day, which also became possible because of Docker.
Now Visa can maximize the utilization of its existing data center
footprint while reducing the time the team spends on refreshing
hardware and patching.
How is Visa gaining operational efficiency with Docker?

10. 2
Citizens Bank wanted the capacity to innovate faster, scale to meet
increased demand, and deliver new applications to modernize the
mortgage experience for its customers while reducing IT
infrastructure costs.
In November 2016, Citizens Bank started its innovation team and
had around a dozen containers and three or four services running.
Since then, they’ve grown to over 3,000 containers across their
entire platform and over 1,000 services.
Docker made it easy for them to tackle every part of the pipeline, all
the way from their development environments through production.
How did Citizens Bank succeed by learning to fail
fearlessly?

11. 2
Tech superpowers using containers
Container-based microservices architecture
Containerized microservices can provide finer-grained execution
environments, faster initialization and execution, and better isolation for
component cohabitation.
Multi-tenancy architecture
Multi-tenancy offers many benefits like lower cost of ownership, fast
deployment, convenient maintenance, API integration scalability, etc.
Also, containers simplify multi-tenancy deployments by using the
Docker runtime and the kernel to spin up each container and enabling
the deployment of multiple enterprise applications on a single host.

12. 2
eBay’s development teams used Docker containers in dev and test
and Kubernetes to support Docker.
Moreover, the organization started running production applications
in containers.
Now, the integration infrastructure of eBay is entirely container-
dependent.
The eBay system has around 1000 microservices that are currently
functioning as per user requirements and evolving continuously.
eBay - Modernized the app with microservices and
containers

13. 2
Pinterest evolved its platform towards containerized technology to
resolve the operational issues and manage the increasing workload.
Pinterest first moved its services to Docker to have an immutable
infrastructure and free up engineering time spent on Puppet.
After the completion of the first phase of containerizing the services,
they planned to adopt the container orchestration and build a multi-
tenant cluster to have a unified interface for long-running services
and batch jobs.
Pinterest - Solved Operations Issues with
Containerization

14. 2
Other general use cases of containers
Building cloud-native applications
Microservices and containers are at the core of cloud-native application
architecture because these apps are generally packaged as lightweight,
self-managed containers to have portability and scalability.
Creating lightweight stateless applications
As containers are ephemeral, the data in a container is not stored after
the container is deleted, shut down, or stops working.
Running big data systems in containers
Running big data systems in containers has become a viable option.
Spark, Hadoop, and other big data platforms can now be deployed in
Docker container clusters.

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