This is how containers convey smart traffic globally

Traditionally, you could witness the extent of Finland’s national prosperity at any seaport, by observing the sheer number of shipping containers filled with export goods being loaded onto ships. Nowadays, export revenue is even created by digital containers. For example, simply by the press of a button, trendy smart traffic is conveyed worldwide from Finland. How is this possible?

If containers are not familiar to you, here’s a crash course in one paragraph: In software development and cloud services, containers are similar to shipping containers. A developer can ‘load’ any part of a program inside a container. Then, code containers can be moved around as easily as a shipping container — directly to cloud, from one cloud to another or from a data center to cloud and back.

What does this mean for enterprises? Their own IT can become a lot more effective. However, perhaps even more radical is how software that runs in containers can be brought anywhere, affordably and quickly. Container technology makes the whole world a playground for software specialists.

One good example is provided by smart traffic, or mobility as a service (MaaS). Vinka, a small Finnish software company, has created a software platform to manage transports and optimize fleet utilization. Such a platform is essential to smart traffic. However, an easy way to duplicate the platform and ensure its performance is paramount for the success of the company.

So, how does Vinka do the trick? It runs its platform entirely in containers and on the cloud. Thanks to this, when Vinka gets a customer in a new city, it can have its service up and running from scratch in as little as ten minutes.

The container platform guarantees a steady ride

Vinka proves that success with containers does not require gigantic IT resources. On the contrary, with containers even a small company can venture out globally.

But it’s also possible to go badly astray with containers. This is because containers alone aren’t enough: rather, just as in logistics in the physical world, digital software containers require tools for managing them. In developer lingo, containers are run on a container platform.

The choice of platform defines whether the ride is going to be steady or bumpy. In order to ensure a smooth ride, Vinka uses Kontena’s container and microservices platform, which we created to facilitate the work of developers and to enable effective container automation and orchestration.

Kontena plays a big role for Vinka. It is vital for the company to be as efficient as possible and optimize their developers’ use of time. According to Vinka, Kontena speeds up work significantly, cutting down time by at least 25% and sometimes by more than half. This saves money directly.

Getting rid of vendor lock-ins

Moreover, Kontena is completely infrastructure- agnostic. In other words, Kontena functions equally no matter where the containers are running. Traditionally, software has been bolted tightly to the underlying technical infrastructure. This has created vendor lock-ins, which are now being dismantled. But this transformation is possible only on one condition: the container platform must be constructed in a way that liberates from slavery to one infrastructure.

Container technology offers huge possibilities for all software service providers. That’s why I recommend it to you, too: make a smart move, utilize container technology and choose Kontena as the platform. Our cloud service can be initialized here.

This is what Vinka’s CTO Janne Kuuskeri has to say:
“Container technology enables us to deploy new installations in an automated way. Kontena was chosen because it offers our developers a platform that makes it is easy to specify what to run, which services must communicate with each other, which stacks are running, how many instances there are, what networks there are, and which containers are healthy.”

About Kontena Inc.

Kontena Inc. is specialized in creating the most developer friendly solution for running containers. Kontena’s products are built on open source technology developed and maintained by Kontena. Kontena was founded in 2015 and has offices in Helsinki, Finland and New York, USA. More information: www.kontena.io.

Photo by Frank Mckenna on Unsplash.

Originally published at blog.kontena.io.