Containerization

Containerization is the OS-level virtualization method that is used to deliver the applications into multiple machines without having the minimal software requirements. Containers are the isolated groups that are running on a single host that fulfills a set of common features. Containers are built on a container engine layer on the host server using the hardware resources along with memory, RAM and central processing units. Container engines are the instances of containers. Containers are portable, faster than virtual machines, easily deployed and are scalable. Some of container tools are docker, kubernetes and openshift.

Docker is an open source platform that builds the dockerfile into the docker images. Docker images are the executable part of the application. These docker images are shipped in containers and then run on multiple systems without disturbing the other available applications in the system.

We would like to implement the container deployment in our Local Pathogen Finder project as this would help us to run the application in many systems without setting up the entire VM, which is time consuming. Also, whenever we change the code they will be able to pull the latest image and access the latest changes immediately.