Srikanth
There are various types of cloud systems available today and we all know the extensive advantages of the cloud when compared to the traditional severs on site. The scalability and flexibility have been an issue for a while and with the advent of cloud those issues have been taken care of. However, to support the parallel computing cloud uses container technology to run multiple instances at the same time without interfering with each other. In the same way what if we can blend the advantages of cloud computing with the containers in the other software frameworks?
Container technology in cloud computing
A container is supposed to enclose the program or application and give it full portability across different hosts. However, the operating system of the different hosts should be same. We can’t really run a container built for linux systems and use it in a different host powered by MacOs. This is where even container technology lacks the true sense of portability. Keeping that aside for a minute, imagine you can transfer the container from one cloud host to another with easy, wouldn’t it solve most of the IT problems existing. Yes, it would, and many IT engineers are thinking about making a move on this issue. However, we can’t say that all the attempts have been fruitful. The idea of containers in the cloud computing is very elegant and visionary but is it really practically possible? Also, we have to account for all the complexities that arise when you containerize a cloud-based application!
Some of the issues that limit the container technology usability
Most of the companies are behind scalability of the infrastructure. However, portability is something that comes along with scalability. If the application is not compatible with the new cloud servers though we are able to provide space and resources for the application, it won’t work. So, here are some limitations that developers can work on.
Generally, the state of the application inside the container is maintained however the state of the application outside the container is not defined. The best way to approach this problem is by having the state maintained outside the container. In this case the user can launch more than one container at a time and each container after performing the task can write their state in the global space that is visible to all the other containers and return to pick up the work-load involved in further processing. Also, the state of the container is kept in track in case there are any shortcomings in the hardware or unforeseen restarts. This way the containers can resume the work where they have left and work the program from there.
However, there are practical restrictions on the functionality of the containers. Though they are far better than Virtual Machines in the cloud computing eco-system there are physical and software limitations that have to be overcome to make it truly portable, scalable and flexible. No matter what cluster management software the developer uses the outcome will be very similar. The issues with container technology are inherent to its own existence. The main challenge for the IT developers would be to overcome the portability problems of the container.
