Historians can look back at the past and outline different stages of evolution. Those who have spent the bulk of their careers managing enterprise servers and application environments have lived through these transitions. Today, we are in the age of containerization, a transformation that is reshaping how applications are hosted while freeing teams from much of the repetitive, low-value operational work that once consumed their time.

From Bare Metal to Virtualization

It wasn’t that long ago that the deployment of every new application began with hardware. Teams procured physical servers, installed operating systems, configured drivers, and updated firmware. Only after these preliminary tasks were completed could the application itself be deployed.

And then came virtualization and suddenly our applications were free from the bare metal beneath them. Instead, multiple isolated virtual machines could run on a single host, dramatically improving resource utilization and introducing a new level of operations. This shift delivered multiple key advantages:

• Strong isolation between workloads
• High availability and mobility across hosts and clusters
• Faster recovery through images and snapshots
• Reduced dependency on underlying hardware drivers and firmware

Eliminating the Dependency of the OS?

Like any new way of doing things, virtualization once felt like a complete solution. However, as virtualization became the norm, its weaknesses eventually surfaced. For instance, while the application servers were no longer tethered to the hardware, each virtual machine remained bound to its own operating system. This inherently redundant requirement continues to consume excess storage and system resources and raises an important question: What if we could eliminate the operating system dependency altogether and package only what an application actually needs to run?

Rethinking this model opens the door to more efficient, environments with reduced overhead.

Stop Delaying Upgrades and Maintenance

How often have you delayed updating or upgrading your VMs because they were running just fine? Afterall, who wants to risk downtime? But that hesitation comes at a cost. Delaying maintenance can leave critical systems running on outdated platforms, increasing exposure to vulnerabilities and limiting access to new capabilities. In a world where technology evolves rapidly, relying on legacy stacks can quietly introduce risk into production environments.

Eliminate the Extra Level of Care for VMs

While virtual machines are significantly faster to deploy than traditional physical servers, they still demand ongoing care and maintenance. Each VM requires patching, monitoring, backups, security hardening, and periodic performance tuning. These routine tasks consume valuable time and often pull IT teams away from more strategic, high-impact initiatives.

As environments grow, so does the operational burden, as the need to maintain multiple full operating systems adds complexity and overhead. At scale, these challenges are only amplified as maintaining consistency, enforcing standards, and adapting quickly to evolving business needs become significantly harder to achieve.

Free Yourself from the OS with Containers

In the same way that virtualization provides abstraction from the underlying hardware, containerization abstracts your applications from the operating system itself. Containers break the dependency that traditionally ties applications to a full OS, allowing them to run more efficiently and consistently across environments.

Containers are standardized, portable, and isolated units of software that bundle an application’s code along with its required libraries, dependencies, and configuration. In simple terms, a container is a lightweight package that includes everything an application needs to run without the overhead of a full operating system. With only the absolute minimal OS components needed to run, a typical container consumes megabytes rather than gigabytes. Containers introduce multiple benefits including:

• Containers take the guesswork out of provisioning the CPU, memory, and storage an application and its underlying OS require.
• New containers can be spun up in a fraction of the time as VMs, thus eliminating the need to prolong updates or troubleshoot an OS issue
• Containers run the same on any system, ensuring consistency across on prem, development, and cloud environments
• Their lightweight nature allows for higher density on existing infrastructure, thus improving resource utilization and reducing costs

Let’s use the analogy of pets versus cattle when contrasting VMs to containers. Like pets, VMs require individualized care and attention, while containers are more like cattle in that they are numbered, replaceable, and manageable at scale. Isn’t that what you want from your application infrastructure?

Virtualization and Containers Working Together

Despite the dominance of virtualization over the previous decade, companies still purchase hardware servers so don’t look at containers as a total replacement for VMs. It is common to run containers on top of VMs to add a further layer of abstraction between applications and their underlying runtime environment. This approach combines the stability and isolation of VMs with the speed and efficiency of containers. By allowing multiple containerized applications to run within a single VM, organizations can significantly reduce the total number of VMs required, improving resource utilization and simplifying management.

To learn more about the value that containers can bring to your business, we invite you to work together with our container specialists who can assess your current infrastructure, identify opportunities for optimization, and help you implement a container strategy aligned with your business goals.

Next Steps: Join the WEI DevOps team for an exclusive multi-workshop series focused on DevOps for SysOps. These virtual workshops are designed to explore DevOps and how to bring its practices to the greater IT industry. Click here for full recordings on the following: 

• Introduction to Git
• Introduction to CaC
• Introduction to Ansible
• Introduction to Terraform
• Introduction to APIs and Python
• Introduction to Containers and Containerized Environments