Using containers in microservices development

Containers are all the rage in the development space. They present us with a lightweight application hosting option that allows us to deploy our applications in a clean and repeatable manner. They are not new, but their use in more commercial and accessible spaces has been made far more popular in recent years. What, however, is a container, and why should we care about how it works? Let us review that next.

What can containers do for me?

Traditionally speaking, whenever we have applications that have specific requirements for environments and software, we would resort to using servers to facilitate the requirements. The problem with servers and servers per application is that they come with costs. A server machine is generally not cheap, and then we must also factor in licensing and energy costs when new machines are introduced. Also, consider that if a machine goes down, we will need to reconfigure that machine to the original environmental...