Lately I've been working allot with containers preparing a really cool lab for Red Hat Summit. The lab is called "Docker for Java Developers" and in this lab participant will learn how to use containers in development and for testing. They will also learn how Kubernetes can help orchestrate as the number of containers grow.

At the same time I'm preparing for a webinar about Microservices. Microservices is an architectural approach, grounded in good software design practices, for delivering and maintaining complex software systems with the velocity and quality required by today’s digital business. The benefits of this architecture are many and varied, including: team agility, flexible tools and frameworks, easy scalability, resilience, better fault tolerance, and ease of maintenance.

Combined Containers and Microservices can work in symbiosis to really accelerate delivery and improve quality.

Containers without Microservices are still powerful, but if you migrate traditional monolithic application into containers without breaking them up into small services that are focus on doing one thing very well, you will quickly also see that containers is just another way to to accomplish the same thing. Yes you will probably have better automation in you delivery pipeline, but the benefits are still limited.

Microservices without containers are similarly limited. All of the early adopters on the Microservices market will tell you that Microservices comes with a new set of challenges. I would argue that most of these challenges are not new, they are just new to the early adopters since they only had a on large monolithic application before migrating the Microservices.

In my view containers an microservices are solutions to two different problems. Like all new solutions they come with their own drawbacks. It's like the catch fraise "2 step forward and 1 step back". However since containers solves the challenges of Microservices and vice-verse, combining them will only result in forward steps.

The end result is exponential improvement in quality, exponential improvements in delivery time that will result in better business services in time to meet market needs.

If you are interested in hearing more about this from me and from other well recognized speakers in Microservices like Adrian Cockcroft from Battery Ventures, Arun Gupta from Red Hat and Babak Mozaffari from Red Hat. Then make sure you sign up for the webinar series "BUILDING ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS THE MICROSERVICES WAY" here.