Home | Reports | Technical Documents | Tech-Blog | One-Shot Gallery | Korea ICT News | Korea Communication Market Data | List of Contributors | Become a Contributor |    
 
 
Section 5G 4G LTE C-RAN/Fronthaul Gigabit Internet IPTV/Video Streaming IoT SDN/NFV Wi-Fi KT SK Telecom LG U+ Network Protocol Samsung   Korean Vendors
 
Real World Private 5G Cases   4 Deployment Models On-Premise Cases 5G Core Control Plane Sharing Cases

5G Core Sharing Cases

   
 
Private 5G Deployment   • Private 5G Frequency Allocation Status in Korea  South Korean government's regulations on private 5G and KT's strategy for entering the market
Cases in Korea   Private 5G Operators |   SK Networks Service (SI) Sejong Telecom (Wire-line Carrier) KT MOS (Affiliate of KT) • Newgens (SI) • NAVER Cloud more >>  
    Enterprise DIY |   Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (Power Plant) Korea Electric Power Corporation (Energy) • Republic of Korea Navy more >>
 
CHANNELS     HFR Private 5G Solution (my5G)       my5G Solution Components       my5G Key Features        my5G Resources        my5G News          
 
banner
banner
Containers – A Primer
March 28, 2018 | By Nikhil Vyakaranam & Dilip Krishna S
Online viewer:
Comments (0)
10

We are pleased to share with you all an interesting article contributed by Nikhil Vyakaranam and Dilip Krishna S.

 
 

Nikhil Vyakaranam

Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco Systems

 

 

All Articles by Nikhil Vyakaranam

 
     
  How to contribute your article to Netmanias.com !  
     
  List of Contributors  

 

 

 

Dilip Krishna S

Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco Systems

 

 

All Articles by Dilip Krishna S

 
     
  How to contribute your article to Netmanias.com !  
     
  List of Contributors  

 

 
     
 
The Problem
 
How often have we seen ourselves running into issues when installing an application on host operating system? The application could be conflicting with other applications like they probably want the same port to operate or you probably want to try out installing multiple versions of the same software or it could be that you do not want some applications to read certain configuration files. Think of a scenario where you need to move or redeploy the same application elsewhere, it is very unlikely that you will pick up all the dependencies from the host machine and move it to another host.
 
The Argument
 
We have a solution to all the above mentioned problems by using Virtualization or Virtual Machines. You can just spin up a VM for running a specific application which will include its own kernel, file system, networks and so on. If you want to try a new version of the same application, just spin up another VM and it will have no visibility to the other VMs or to the host OS and could use the same network and port as the other . If you decide to move your application to another server, you could use VM migration tools or even convert the VM into a template and carry it in a pen drive and deploy it elsewhere. 
 
Flexible isn’t it? But there are some disadvantages too. It is about the resources it consumes. If you are planning to deploy a single application on a VM and say the application needs very less resources, you still need a certain amount of compute resources on the VM for the Guest OS and the Hypervisor to run. You can only imagine the extent to which such resources are being wasted in a large datacenter. 
 
Another talking point is the time that Virtual Machines takes to startup and shutdown, probably in the order of few minutes. 
 
What are Containers?
 
A definition says “Containers are an abstraction at the app layer that packages code and dependencies together”. It practically means just the Application and its dependent binaries and libraries are packaged into a container with no extra baggage of an operating system. 
 
How does it work then? 
 
Containers utilize the host operating system kernel and runs in an isolated user space. Multiple containers can be run on a host as it shares the Host OS kernel but runs in isolated user spaces with no visibility to each other. If you look at it from the container side, it will have a filesystem of its own and cannot see the host file system. Containers will also have its own process table different from the Host OS process table. Remember hardware virtualization is what enables Virtual Machines , on the contrary containerization is all about Operating System Virtualization. They are lightweight as they do not depend on an additional layer like hypervisor.
 
Containers use a layer of software called container engine on top of the OS. An example of container engine is Docker. They have a significant lesser overhead than VM. This is because of the sharing of the kernel with the host OS which means containers can start and stop extremely fast. Usually the startup time is the time that container process takes to start.
 
A typical path to production deployment involves the software to go through development environment, Test environment and finally into the Live or Production state. Each of these stages will involve installation and configuration of staging environment including all the complex dependencies which is like thrice the effort. In the world of containers, if you intend to move your application say from your test environment to production, just build the image and use the same image in the production environment. Upgrading the application software is not same anymore. The traditional methods includes upgrading your virtual machines right from the dependencies for the application and the application itself. With containers, we come across “Immutable Infrastructures” meaning, there is no upgrade procedures any more, just delete your present containers and create new ones. The new containers can be spun up in a matter of seconds. There are other CI/CD tools which can aid this in production environment from a different angle. We plan to cover this topic in detail in the upcoming posts.
 
All the discussions above can be summed up into the below diagrams. Figure-1 shows how multiple layers are involved between the application and the host operating system. Figure-2 shows how application and dependencies are packaged and the containers running directly on the host OS.
 
Figure-1  Figure-2
However Figure-2 gives us an impression that the container engine is in the execution path between the application and the host OS which is not the case. Figure-3 removes this ambiguity with the container engine shown as daemon running on the host OS. The daemon generally interacts with the containers and the container images.
 
Figure-3
 
Some other examples of container technologies include LXC, OpenVZ, Linux VServer, BSD Jails, and Solaris zones.
 

For more articles by Nikhil Vyakaranam and Dilip Krishna S on Technically Speaking, please see: https://cloudifynetwork.com

 

 

Thank you for visiting Netmanias! Please leave your comment if you have a question or suggestion.
Related Contents
12/01/2018
Netmanias Blog
04/12/2018
Netmanias Blog
11/30/2017
Netmanias Blog
10/16/2017
Netmanias Blog
05/18/2017
Netmanias One-Shot Gallery
02/07/2017
Netmanias Blog
10/24/2016
Netmanias Blog
 
 
 
 

[HFR Private 5G: my5G]

 

Details >>

 

 

 

     
         
     

 

     
     

Subscribe FREE >>

Currently, 55,000+ subscribed to Netmanias.

  • You can get Netmanias Newsletter

  • You can view all netmanias' contents

  • You can download all netmanias'

    contents in pdf file

     
     

 

     
         
     

 

 

 

View All (854)
4.5G (1) 5G (101) AI (7) AR (1) ARP (3) AT&T (1) Akamai (1) Authentication (5) BSS (1) Big Data (2) Billing (1) Blockchain (3) C-RAN/Fronthaul (18) CDN (4) CPRI (4) Carrier Ethernet (3) Charging (1) China (1) China Mobile (2) Cisco (1) Cloud (5) CoMP (6) Connected Car (4) DHCP (5) EDGE (1) Edge Computing (1) Ericsson (2) FTTH (6) GSLB (1) GiGAtopia (2) Gigabit Internet (19) Google (7) Google Global Cache (3) HLS (5) HSDPA (2) HTTP Adaptive Streaming (5) Handover (1) Huawei (1) IEEE 802.1 (1) IP Routing (7) IPTV (21) IoST (3) IoT (56) KT (43) Korea (20) Korea ICT Market (1) Korea ICT Service (13) Korea ICT Vendor (1) LG U+ (18) LSC (1) LTE (78) LTE-A (16) LTE-B (1) LTE-H (2) LTE-M (3) LTE-U (4) LoRa (7) MEC (4) MPLS (2) MPTCP (3) MWC 2015 (8) NB-IoT (6) Netflix (2) Network Protocol (21) Network Slice (1) Network Slicing (4) New Radio (9) Nokia (1) OSPF (2) OTT (3) PCRF (1) Platform (2) Private 5G (10) QoS (3) RCS (4) Roaming (1) SD-WAN (17) SDN/NFV (71) SIM (1) SK Broadband (2) SK Telecom (35) Samsung (5) Security (16) Self-Driving (1) Small Cell (2) Spectrum Sharing (2) Switching (6) TAU (2) UHD (5) VR (2) Video Streaming (12) VoLTE (8) VoWiFi (2) Wi-Fi (31) YouTube (6) blockchain (1) eICIC (1) eMBMS (1) iBeacon (1) security (1) telecoin (1) uCPE (2)
Password confirmation
Please enter your registered comment password.
Password