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What are challenges of containerized applications?
Containerized applications may face many challenges related to availability, scalability, security, management, networking, storage and debugging
Challenges can range from difficulties in provisioning and configuring containers to managing data and state within the container environment. It's important for architects, developers and operations teams to be aware of these challenges and to have strategies in place to address them to ensure the reliability and performance of containerized applications.
Availability - containerized applications may struggle with availability in case of failures or excessive load. These failures can be caused by issues such as hardware failures, network issues, or software bugs.
Scalability - containerized applications may have difficulty adapting to changes in the environment. Scalability issues in containerized applications refer to the difficulty in adapting to changes in the environment. This can include issues such as the need to add or remove containers, or the need to increase or decrease the resources allocated to a container.
Security - containerized applications may be more susceptible to attacks due to a lack of control over the execution environment. This can include issues such as unauthorized access to sensitive data, or vulnerabilities in the container environment.
Management - managing containers can be difficult, especially for large, scalable applications. This can include issues such as provisioning and configuring containers, monitoring and troubleshooting containerized applications, and managing containerized applications in a production environment.
Networking - Containerized applications may struggle with networking issues due to a lack of network visibility and control within the container. This can include issues such as lack of network visibility, lack of control over network configuration, and difficulty in connecting containers to external networks.
Persistent storage and data management - containerized applications may have difficulty managing data and state, as containers are typically ephemeral. This can include issues such as the need to persist data across container restarts, or the need to manage data across multiple containers.
Deployment - deploying containerized applications can be complex, especially if multiple deployments must be coordinated to work together.
Debugging and tweaking - debugging containerized applications can be difficult, as the containerized environment is usually stripped down, and not having debugging tools, which are available in the development environment.