Challenges

Containers have seen a huge rejuvenation in the past three years. They provide a great way to package, ship, and run applications - that is the Docker motto, now provided by many tools.

The developer experience has been boosted tremendously thanks to containers. Containers, and Docker specifically, have empowered developers with ease of building container images, simplicity of sharing images via registries, and providing a powerful user experience to manage containers. Now several tools, such as Buildah, Podman, containerd, and others allow for easy container creation and management.

However, managing containers at scale and architecting a distributed application based on microservices' principles is still challenging.

You first need a continuous integration pipeline to build your container images, test them, and verify them. Then, you need a cluster of machines acting as your base infrastructure on which to run your containers. You also need a system to launch your containers, and watch over them when things fail and self-heal. You must be able to perform rolling updates and rollbacks, and eventually tear down the resource when no longer needed.

All of these actions require flexible, scalable, and easy-to-manage network and storage.​ As containers are launched on any worker node, the network must join the resource to other containers, while still keeping the traffic secure from others. We also need a storage structure which provides and keeps or recycles storage in a seamless manner.