Docker is one of those companies that always seems to excite me when they announce what they’ve been working on. The funny thing is that in general, they aren’t really doing anything new - most of the time they’re just doing old things better than anyone else.
Docker isn’t new, just better
Containers for instance have been around long before Docker made them popular. For example, Google has been using containers for many years and have provided various open source tools for their containers such as Kubernetes. Even though the concept isn’t new, there is no doubt that containers solve a lot of problems and we at Mumba are very pleased to be using them within our enterprise mobile app solution because they make building our enterprise mobile and web application easier and we can deploy and manage our services in less time.
Docker makes working with containers easier
Thanks to Docker’s approach to containerization, they’ve made working with containers significantly easier so that anyone from freelance developers through to large enterprise companies can implement Docker containers and realize the same benefits that companies like Google have been enjoying for a long time.
At Mumba we recognized the benefits of containerising our services a little over a year ago when we were working towards a highly flexible and distributed Microservice architecture for our backend services.
Containers make building with Microservices easier
Traditionally, the complexity around deploying and managing Microservices has inhibited their widespread adoption resulting in the continued pursuit of overburdened monolithic applications. Large enterprises are starting to feel the pains of dealing with monolithic applications as agility, flexibility, scalability and device agnostic access is becoming a key factor for enterprise architects and CTOs.
The simple idea of making something that does one thing well and then making it reusable emerged in Object Oriented programming, as a good example, and so the concept of Microservice patterns will continue to improve as their value is better understood. I’m guessing that as time goes on we will see everything written using a Microservice approach and as we at Mumba explore and develop new tools to manage and deploy Microservices we are very optimistic about their future.
We realized that in order to deliver true mobility as a managed service, and at scale, and for enterprise customers, all with differing requirements, our Microservice architecture would become complex very quickly and we needed a simple way to deploy, scale and manage our services appropriately.
With the help of Docker and the philosophies that surround Microservices (and some of our other neat tech such as WAMP (Web Application Messaging Protocol) we have done just that. Docker allows us the flexibility to deploy and manage our Microservices at scale and every service that we build is done in a way that is scalable and reusable; this enables us to avoid rebuilding our services so that we can move faster with greater agility.
For more information about Mumba's unique architecture and how we are tackling enterprise mobility, please download our complete solution whitepaper.
