Understanding containers

Applications are getting more complex, and the demand to develop faster puts stress on your infrastructure, IT teams, and processes. Containers help you alleviate pain points and iterate quickly—across multiple environments.

Red Hat OpenShift

Quickly build and deploy applications at scale, while you modernize the ones you already have.

What are containers?

Containers are a technology that allow applications to be packaged and isolated with their entire runtime environment. This makes it easier to maintain consistent behavior and functionality while moving the contained application between environments (dev, test, production) and across public, private, hybrid cloud, and on-premise. Because they are lightweight and portable, containers provide opportunities for faster development and meeting business needs as they arise.

Read more about containers

Containerization

Containerization is packaging together software code with all its necessary components.

Linux container

A Linux® container is a set of processes isolated from the rest of the system.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration platform.

Containers vs. VMs

Containers and VMs are 2 approaches to packaging computing environments.

Container security

Container security is safeguarding containerized applications from vulnerabilities.

Container orchestration

Automating container deployment, management, scaling, and networking.

Container-native virtualization

Run and manage virtual machine workloads alongside container workloads.

Container registry

A container registry is a repository used to store and access container images.

Sandboxed containers

A controlled environment used to execute untested programs without risk to the system.

Hosted control planes

A cloud-native architecture where the control plane is managed as a service.

High availability for containers

High availability is key to minimizing downtime and handling unforeseen failures.

OpenShift vs. OKD

OpenShift is a container orchestration platform. OKD is the upstream project.

Docker

A tool for treating containers like lightweight, modular virtual machines.

Podman

A tool for developing, managing, and running containers.

Skopeo

A tool for manipulating, inspecting, signing, and transferring container images.

Buildah

A tool that provides a flexible and efficient way to build container images.

etcd

A datastore for shared configuration, service discovery, and scheduler coordination.

Podman Desktop

A tool that lets developers manage containers through a GUI in their local environment.

Clair

A project for monitoring container security through vulnerability analysis.

CaaS

Containers-as-a-Service helps manage and deploy apps using container-based abstraction.

Resources

Report

Red Hat is a Leader for the 3rd year in a row in the 2025 Gartner® Magic QuadrantTM for Container Management

E-book

How to use Red Hat OpenShift® as a modern application platform

E-book

O'Reilly provides reusable Kubernetes patterns to design and implement cloud-native applications

Training courses

Running Containers with Red Hat Technical Overview

Containers, Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift Technical Overview

Developing Cloud-Native Applications with Microservices Architectures

Customer success stories

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ttb adopts microservices with Red Hat OpenShift and Dynatrace

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Colombian government uses Red Hat OpenShift to digitize thousands of processes

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Point Duty achieves critical data integration with Red Hat OpenShift

More about containers

Products

An enterprise application platform with a unified set of tested services for bringing apps to market on your choice of infrastructure.

Resources

Podcast

Command Line Heroes Season 1, Episode 5:
"The Containers Derby"

Training

Free training course

Running Containers with Red Hat Technical Overview

Free training course

Containers, Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift Technical Overview

Free training course

Developing Cloud-Native Applications with Microservices Architectures