Best Practices for Container Development

So if you’re looking at a shift away from standard application development, what do you do? You learn as fast as you can. And given how fast the development world is evolving these days, that pace has reached a breakneck speed. So you have to learn best practices quickly, or you run the risk of either being pushed out of the game, or constantly deploying applications that either don’t work, aren’t reliable, can’t scale, or are far too insecure to be used in an enterprise environment.

What are some of the best practices you should already be up to speed on for container development? Let’s take a look at some of those which are more immediate and can be implemented from the very beginning of your journey.

Use Stable Images From Known Entities

This is at the top of the list, simply because job function email list it has become one of the single most important issues facing container security. Everything you develop in a containerized world starts with an image. You might build your own from scratch or you might take the quick route and pull an image from, say, Docker Hub. Should you go the third-party route, you must always only use stable images from known entities.

Say, for example, you want to base a container deployment on the latest Python image. If you search Docker Hub, you’ll find plenty of images for Python, but only one official image from the actual Python developers. That’s the image you should use. Every image that comes from an official entity will be tagged as such. It’s important that you only ever use those images. Don’t pull down an image from an unknown source, because you never know what it might contain.

Keep Your Images Small

You might be tempted to form we also see this trend with the proliferation of independent your containers on an image that includes several bells and whistles. Keep this in mind: The bigger the image, the bigger your container. If you base all of those containers on larger images when you’re deploying an application that includes a number of moving parts, not only are you introducing unnecessary services, you risk racking up a significantly higher cloud hosting bill.

Remember, the idea behind containerization is to achieve massive scalability at reduced prices. So deploying containers based on large images defeats that purpose.

Don’t do that. Always use the smallest (official) image you can find. And if you can’t find an official image small enough, create your own. On top of which, with a larger image, the attack plan can grow exponentially.

Keep it small.

Use Persistent Data

You should avoid storing data within andorra business directory a container’s storage layer. Why? Two reasons: Storage and accessibility. Consider this: If you were to store data within a container’s storage layer, that container is going to grow exponentially. That’s not all. Should the container go down, the data will no longer be accessible. Instead, you should store your data in persistent volumes.

By using volumes you ensure the size of the containers won’t grow as more data is collected, and the data stored can be accessible by numerous containers.

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