Legacy systems have run their course: they were important to drive business growth, acted as allies to capture and process valuable data, and demanded huge amounts of money and resources to achieve the strength they display today, but in a world where the future is imposing itself at every moment, there is no worse decision than to remain stuck in the past.

Application modernization, therefore, has become a key part of the transition to modern infrastructures, to get value from the latest technologies, to unleash the potential of data and to deliver the best possible customer experience.

And among the different paths that allow us to move towards the modernization of applications, containers, such as Kubernetes or Docker, stand out: these are execution environments for a software that contain and contemplate all the dependencies it needs in a standard format that, in turn, works as a package isolated from the system.

This means that it can run rapidly and reliably in any environment.  From a business point of view, the use of containers not only accelerates the time to market of modernized applications, but also allows them to be updated, patched or scalability problems to be solved without service interruptions.

Automation and container management

Automation plays a key role in all this: container management often removes the need for manual tasks when it comes to deploying and tuning solutions or distributing workloads across the different environments available, resulting in less complexity, greater visibility, and lower costs.

There are no limits to their implementation: they are as suitable for companies that want to maintain a traditional operation as for those that are working in hybrid multi-cloud environments. Here, containers make it unnecessary to build and maintain separate architectures for each cloud service provider, but enable the creation of a single infrastructure that is deployed in all of them.

Combined with the concept of microservices, containers enable end-to-end application development through modules, performing updates in an agile manner. Cell phone apps and digital platforms have gotten us used to this modality: in general, apps tend to incorporate new features, change their look & feel, eliminate bugs or improve general security aspects in a perfectly transparent way for the user, who will always have the latest version installed and running on his device without major inconveniences.

Just imagine the power that grants an organization to incorporate features or proposals to its digital tools with such simplicity.

Benefits of containers

The benefits, from this point of view, include the availability of solutions that are always stable and secure, the disappearance of hidden costs linked to the use of inefficient or, even worse, obsolete infrastructures, and, of course, the possibility of counting on technology as a key ally to drive business growth.

For all these reasons, it is reasonable that the increase in adoption is exponential: according to Markets & Research, the market for Kubernetes alone will grow from US$1.8 billion in 2022 to US$7.8 billion in 2030. Meanwhile, the containers-as-a-service model will scale globally from $2.12 billion to $10.75 billion over the same period, according to Polaris Market Research.

In short, containers reduce the complexity of software deployment and maintenance, significantly reduce the management and maintenance costs associated with traditional infrastructures, take efficiency to a new level ( underused infrastructure disappears) and, most importantly, enable the organization to modernize in an unsurprisingly controlled way.