Containers and the Importance of a Training Partner Who Understands Them

Terry Cox
Terry Cox
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

In 2018, it is impossible to go to a developer or cloud conference or attend a talk that does not eventually get around to talking about containers or container orchestration.

The big three cloud vendors (Amazon, Google and Microsoft) are all in when it comes to containers, particularly with Kubernetes for orchestration. Why is this?

How Virtualization is Structured

During the golden age of virtualization (which has hardly ‘gone by’, but in the world of technology, it is certainly old hat), use cases were driven by the need to maximize the corporate spend on infrastructure. Buying physical hardware that was designed to meet the highest resource needs of a given application meant that it was not uncommon for it to sit idle for most of its life. In an effort to maximize that investment, virtualization was born. Suddenly, our powerful servers could provide resources to multiple applications under normal load. In clusters, these new ‘hypervisors’ could even move workloads between physical systems when resource utilization necessitated.

Although we now could serve multiple applications on a single virtual server, there were still efficiencies that were missing that continued to drive cost (storage chief among them since we now stored full operating systems multiple times on the same storage devices).

Containers solve many of those problems. Now, to be clear, containers have been around for some time (mainframe partitions, Solaris containers, BSD Jails, etc). Just as we began to reach the limitations of virtualization in terms of benefits, Docker comes along and ‘wraps’ containers into a nice, easy to manage and manipulate manner. Now, we have this mechanism to maximize resource utilization even further by only storing the dependencies for a given application since we no longer require a full OS stack. Each container can just use the compute resources it needs, or can easily be limited as desired.

How Containers Differ

If that were all that containers did, it might still have been enough. But they do so much more. Now we can abstract discrete functions and applications easily. We can isolate their process from each other and the underlying host operating system. We can deploy, upgrade and redeploy in seconds. We can move them around, consistently deploying application states in dev, test, staging and production environments and have them look and behave exactly the same way.

How do we manage those containers across a large cluster? Orchestration tools like Docker Swarm and Kubernetes all fit that bill and each has their advantages (with Kubernetes arguably having the most momentum and support, particularly in the cloud). So, how do you get your hands around all of this?

Kubernetes and Container Orchestration

That is where having a training partner like Linux Academy is so important. With no specific allegiance other than to our students, we can provide the vital training (certification preparation or real world deep dives and use cases) that your organization needs to understand and implement containers in the right way.

How do we do that? With a dedicated, full time staff of certified instructors. We do not use contractors that are here today and gone tomorrow. Even in our certification preparation courses, we are equally driven to prepare you to pass the certification as we are to prepare you to apply your knowledge in the enterprise. With learning activities that provision real environments, you can get your hands on the technologies and practice everything you learn. At the end, you receive feedback on how well you did and what you may need to review.

All of this is available for a monthly or yearly subscription. The most important thing about that subscription is that once you sign up, it never changes. Although it is rare, occasionally subscription pricing changes for a variety of reasons. However, your subscription price will never go up once you subscribe as long as you maintain it. That is our commitment to students who are committed to their education and success. It is one of the company core values. A core value is something that drives everything you do, to the point where you reverse course if you find you are doing anything that is contrary to those values, even if that means at expense of losing the money that activity is generating.

Having a training partner who understands the technology and how to teach it is extremely valuable. Having a training partner committed to the success of their student community as a core value is invaluable.

UPDATE: As further proof of our commitment to the success of our students, see this link for a special deal this week for ANYONE signing up for a 1 year subscription to Linux Academy. Save $150 off of our existing yearly rate!

Written by

Terry Cox

Linux and DevOps Course Author at Linux Academy

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