Why Containers Are Becoming Essential For AI Tasks
There was a time when containers weren’t considered an industry changing effort but over a period of time, container platforms like Kubernetes is becoming the new operating system, what with cloud-native tech giants Google, AWS and Microsoft putting all their might behind it.
In the computing world, containers are defined as the operating system virtualization that enables developers to run an application and its dependencies in resource-isolated processes. All in all, containers can package an application’s code, configurations, and dependencies into easy to use building blocks that deliver environmental consistency, operational efficiency, developer productivity, and version control. This is how theAWS technical documentationsums it up.
Seema Kumar, Country Leader, Developer Ecosystem & Startups, IBM India/South Asia, in heraddress at Cypher 2018defined containers as self contained units in the cloud world with the required software which work like an Operating System. Developers can run application within that unit making it easy to plug and play that application from one environment to the other, ruling out the dependency on underlying hardware and it can run on any cloud native platform.
Now, why containers are important is because they give more control to developers over resources and running containers in the cloud, like Azure or AWS allows the developers to build robust, scalable applications and one only pays for the resources used (memory, disk space or CPU). In terms of computing resources, containers help developers to get the most by enabling them to run multiple applications on a similar instance. By embracing container platforms, cloud natives are helping enterprise customers get their workloads into the cloud, and embrace a multi-cloud hybrid architecture.
Today, every cloud provider is stepping up the game around containers, which has become the dominant way of packaging applications and delivering a cloud-native management experience.
Containers are believed to be a start to something bigger, with tech heavyweights like Microsoft and Google selling and running enterprise software as pre-packaged Kubernetes applications. And this is backed by a bunch of reasons.Seema Kumar, Country Leader, Developer Ecosystem & Startups, IBM India/South Asia, spoke about the importance of containers in the information architecture and how a unified architecture can enable AI applications.
In heraddress at Cypher 2018, she outlined why popular container standards – Kuberenete and Docker can pave the way for unified and simplified platform for a) collecting data (database on demand, federated query, fast data ingest); b) organizing data (data integration, data curation, governance & data asset lifecycle management); c) Analyze data (data visualization & exploration, machine learning & deep learning, model management & deployment).
