Advantages of using Docker for Microservices

Docker can be used to automate the deployment of applications as portable, self-sufficient containers on the cloud as well as on-premise environments, both Linux and Windows.

Some of the advantages of using Docker for microservices include:

Top-notch community support

The ability to work with microservices and therefore build cloud-native applications

It’s more lightweight than virtual machines and therefore cost and resource-effective

Provides uniform development and production environments

Facilitates continuous integration and deployment

Integrates with popular tools and services such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Ansible, Kubernetes, Istio, and the like

Using Kubernetes for automated deployment, management and scaling of an application

Kubernetes (also known as K8s) enables the efficient sharing of computing resources across multiple processes, thereby optimising infrastructure utilisation by dynamically allocating computing resources based on demand.

As a result, it brings down the cost of computing resources and also improves productivity. It also makes the transition to microservices a lot easier by providing autonomy and freedom to the development teams and breaking down monolithic applications into independent, loosely-coupled microservices.

Since there needs to be close collaboration in infrastructure sharing, using Kubernetes provides the teams with a common framework for “describing, inspecting, and reasoning” infrastructure resource sharing and utilisation by:

Forecasting the computing needs of all the resources

Forecasting the impact of loading these requirements

Carving out infrastructure partitions and dividing them between microservices

Enforcing resource restrictions

How Docker and Kubernetes Work Together

Docker is fast becoming the default container format and includes a runtime environment called the Docker Engine and a container registry like Docker Hub or Azure Container Registry. Container registries facilitate the building and running containers on any development machine.

The complexities of working with Docker

While Docker facilitates the process of packaging and distributing contained apps, as applications scale more containers need to be deployed across multiple servers, adding complexity. This can result in the following issues:

Coordination and scheduling of many containers becomes a challenge

Different containers in the app need to talk to each other, and this could lead to errors

Scaling up many container instances also results in bottlenecks