47 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
47 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
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# The 5 principles of Standard Containers
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Define a unit of software delivery called a Standard Container.
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The goal of a Standard Container is to encapsulate a software component and all its dependencies in a format that is self-describing and portable, so that any compliant runtime can run it without extra dependencies, regardless of the underlying machine and the contents of the container.
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The specification for Standard Containers defines:
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1. configuration file formats
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2. a set of standard operations
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3. an execution environment.
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A great analogy for this is the physical shipping container used by the transportation industry.
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Shipping containers are a fundamental unit of delivery, they can be lifted, stacked, locked, loaded, unloaded and labelled.
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Irrespective of their contents, by standardizing the container itself it allowed for a consistent, more streamlined and efficient set of processes to be defined.
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For software Standard Containers offer similar functionality by being the fundamental, standardized, unit of delivery for a software package.
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## 1. Standard operations
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Standard Containers define a set of STANDARD OPERATIONS.
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They can be created, started, and stopped using standard container tools; copied and snapshotted using standard filesystem tools; and downloaded and uploaded using standard network tools.
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## 2. Content-agnostic
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Standard Containers are CONTENT-AGNOSTIC: all standard operations have the same effect regardless of the contents.
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They are started in the same way whether they contain a postgres database, a php application with its dependencies and application server, or Java build artifacts.
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## 3. Infrastructure-agnostic
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Standard Containers are INFRASTRUCTURE-AGNOSTIC: they can be run in any OCI supported infrastructure.
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For example, a standard container can be bundled on a laptop, uploaded to cloud storage, downloaded, run and snapshotted by a build server at a fiber hotel in Virginia, uploaded to 10 staging servers in a home-made private cloud cluster, then sent to 30 production instances across 3 public cloud regions.
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## 4. Designed for automation
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Standard Containers are DESIGNED FOR AUTOMATION: because they offer the same standard operations regardless of content and infrastructure, Standard Containers, are extremely well-suited for automation.
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In fact, you could say automation is their secret weapon.
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Many things that once required time-consuming and error-prone human effort can now be programmed.
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Before Standard Containers, by the time a software component ran in production, it had been individually built, configured, bundled, documented, patched, vendored, templated, tweaked and instrumented by 10 different people on 10 different computers.
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Builds failed, libraries conflicted, mirrors crashed, post-it notes were lost, logs were misplaced, cluster updates were half-broken.
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The process was slow, inefficient and cost a fortune - and was entirely different depending on the language and infrastructure provider.
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## 5. Industrial-grade delivery
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Standard Containers make INDUSTRIAL-GRADE DELIVERY of software a reality.
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Leveraging all of the properties listed above, Standard Containers are enabling large and small enterprises to streamline and automate their software delivery pipelines.
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Whether it is in-house devOps flows, or external customer-based software delivery mechanisms, Standard Containers are changing the way the community thinks about software packaging and delivery.
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