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Software Engineering vocabulary · Release and Maintenance

Container

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/kənˈteɪnər/nounCore term

In software engineering, container means: A lightweight, isolated package that holds an application together with everything it needs to run, so it behaves the same on a laptop, a test server or in the cloud.

In Turkish: konteyner, kapsayıcı

How it is used

Containers share the host's operating system kernel, so they start in seconds and use less memory than virtual machines. You build, run, stop and restart containers; Docker is the best-known tool.

Example sentences

  1. The container keeps restarting because the app crashes when the config file is missing.

  2. Each microservice runs in its own container, so we can update them independently.

Common collocations

  • run a container
  • container image
  • container runtime
  • restart a container
  • containerized app
  • DockerA widely used platform for building container images and running containers. It made containers popular after its release in 2013.
  • container imageA read-only package with an application, its libraries and settings, used as the template from which containers are started.
  • KubernetesAn open-source system that runs and manages containers across many machines: it starts them, restarts failed ones, spreads traffic and scales them up or down.
  • virtual machineA complete computer, with its own operating system, that runs as software on a physical machine. One physical server can host many virtual machines at once.
  • podThe smallest unit that Kubernetes runs: one or more containers that are always placed together on the same node and share a network address and storage.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Release and Maintenance

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