Containers
Images, registries, immutability and the deployment model they enable.
3 to work through
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advanced
A developer platform receives thousands of simultaneous builds after a popular framework release. How should build queues, worker pools, priority scheduling, concurrency limits, caching and backpressure prevent capacity collapse?
2 min answer -
advanced
A developer-tools company runs enormous numbers of short-lived build and test containers where startup time dominates total runtime. Which container strategy decisions matter most?
2 min answer -
advanced
An organisation with eight services and four engineers proposes adopting Kubernetes. Make the case against, then name what would change your mind.
2 min answer
5 terms in this topic
Container Image
A layered, content-addressed filesystem bundle plus metadata, from which containers are instantiated — immutable by construction and identified by digest.
toolContainers
Packaging an application with its dependencies into an immutable image, and the orchestration layer that schedules those images across a fleet.
case-studyGoogle Borg to Kubernetes: Learning From an Internal System
Kubernetes was designed with a decade of Borg experience behind it, and its authors have been explicit about which Borg decisions they deliberately d…
toolImage Registry
The store from which container images are pulled, and an under-appreciated availability and security dependency of every deployment and every autosca…
practiceSuperseded-Work Cancellation
Cancelling queued work that a later submission has made irrelevant - usually the largest single capacity saving available during a burst, and almost …
Neighbouring topics
Cloud Architecture
General material on designing for cloud platforms.
Compute Models
Instances, containers and functions, and what each is priced and shaped for.
Cloud Storage
Object, block and file storage, and the access patterns each suits.
Cloud Databases
Managed relational, key-value, document and analytical services.
Kubernetes
The reconciliation loop, and whether the workload needs what it provides.
Serverless
Scale to zero, per-request billing, cold starts and connection limits.
Autoscaling
Signals, delays and bounds — and the maximum that caps a runaway bill.
Load Balancing
Distributing traffic, health checking, and removing failures from rotation.
Multi-Region Architecture
Surviving a region, and the data consistency price of doing so.
Availability Zones
The unit of correlated physical failure, and what zones do not protect against.
Disaster Recovery
Backup-restore, pilot light, warm standby and active-active postures.
Backup Strategies
Scope, immutability, separation, and the restore drill that makes it real.
Infrastructure as Code
Declarative infrastructure, drift, state files and rebuild-from-empty.
Landing Zones
A governed foundation of accounts, network, identity and guardrails.
Managed Services
Which operational responsibilities actually transfer, and which do not.
Cloud Migration
Per-application disposition, sequencing and the capability change underneath.
Multi-Cloud
Best-of-breed, portfolio and portable — three very different costs.
Edge Computing
Moving compute towards the user, and what cannot follow it.
Cloud Governance
Preventive policy, tagging, quotas and cost and security guardrails.