Zato Blog: Zato and Docker installation options - general overview

Docker is a containerization platform that gained immense popularity in the IT world as a tool that can contain an application and help to deploy it to multiple environments.

History

Before Docker, there were different approaches whose goal was to obtain a reliable development and deployment process, which means testing and putting the application into production as a reproducible unit where the same result is always achieved.

The leading way to isolate and organize applications along with their their dependencies was to place each and every application in its own virtual machine. Physical hardware runs multiple such environments and the whole process is called virtualization.

Containerization

Containerization is a type of virtualization which brings virtualization to the operating system level. Containerization brings abstraction to the operating system, while virtualization brings abstraction to the hardware.

• Containers are lightweight and typically faster than Virtual Machines
• Containers share relevant libraries and resources
• The boot up process is very fast since the applications run on the host kernel

Docker

Docker is a tool used to easily package, distribute and deploy applications with all its dependencies into a standardized unit called a Docker image. It provides the ability to create predictable environments which can be used for development, testing and deploying the application in multiple environments, including production.

Some Docker concepts:

• Image: an executable package that includes everything needed to run the application
• Container: a runtime instance of an image

A Docker container can be connected with other containers that provide functionality to the application like a database or a load balancer.

In Zato we create Docker images of two kinds:

• A Zato quickstart image
• An image to deploy to cloud environments for Swarm, Kubernetes and Helm

The idea behind the Zato quickstart image is to very quickly provision a fully working all-in-one Zato cluster that can be used to test a new service locally or explore Zato but, because this is a real Zato cluster, it can also be used for production purposes.

The image used for cloud environments provides more flexibility and can be used to deploy an instance of a Zato component like server, scheduler or web admin into the Zato cluster, each under its own container. That is, whereas Zato quickstart contains all the Zato components in a single image, the cloud one splits the components into separate Docker containers.

Wrapping up

This is it for now - we will be talking about these two types of Zato images and how to use them in upcoming articles.

from Planet Python
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