Containers are fast becoming an adapted technology in computing today. It is a popular way to simplify and speed up application deployment especially when the development team has fully embraced DevOps. Some of the factors to consider before deploying the use of containers include:

·     Using containers makes it difficult to move data securely between locations especially amongst cloud providers storage does not scale with apps

·     Legacy storage architectures are often complex and do not provide API functionality to support containerized environments

·     Performance is often unpredictable

·     Stateless containers do not support integrated enterprise requirements.

Developer challenges arising when working with containers

Container based applications are required to be secured and available for conventional application data needs such as load balancing and performance monitoring.Sometimes developers encounter some challenges in trying to adapt a containerized environment for such tasks and applications. Some of the challenges encountered when working with containers include:

1.     Elasticity: This is important in the context of container-based applications because containers can be spun up or taken down quickly compared to traditional infrastructure. Applications running in containers in clouds and data centers aren't able to keep up the pace with their slower underlying traditional infrastructure. This dramatically hampers productivity and is a bane for developers who are continuously trying to integrate container operability with traditional infrastructure.

2.     Integration for automation:application-centric enterprises are continuously looking for a way to eliminate error-prone manual activities. This they aim to achieve through automating repetitive operations. For developers, achieving this degree of agility can pose a daunting task considering the backward compatibility of the underlying infrastructure with the API connecting the container. A workable solution will be using the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) method.

3.     Granularity: At the infrastructure level in a container-based application, a single service is represented by multiple containers residing on multiple hosts. But from a networking standpoint, each of these containers is viewed as a unique application node requiring the same load balancing and traffic management services as conventional applications.

4.     Monitoring - enterprise applications deployed in containerized environments regularly require monitoring and analytics. A great deal of time and precision is needed for these monitoring sessions for alerts based on application performance and general system health. Developers likewise would devote a significant chunk of development time for monitoring performance while conducting test cases.

5.     Maintaining container security

6.     Choosing the right container technology

7.     Optimizing the underlying infrastructure for containers

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