Containers have garnered broad appeal through their ability to package an application and its dependencies into a single image that can be promoted from development, to test, and to production. Containers make it easy to ensure consistency across environments and across multiple deployment targets like physical servers, virtual machines (VMs), and private or public clouds. With containers, teams can more easily develop and manage the applications that deliver business agility.

Applications: Containers make it easier for developers to build and promote an application and its dependencies as a unit. Containers can be deployed in seconds. In a containerized environment, the software build process is the stage in the life cycle where application code is integrated with needed runtime libraries.

Infrastructure: Containers represent sandboxed application processes on a shared Linux^® OS kernel. They are more compact, lighter, and less complex than virtual machines and are portable across different environments—from on-premises to public cloud platforms.

Kubernetes is the container orchestration platform of choice for the enterprise. With many organizations now running essential services on containers, ensuring container security has never been more critical. This paper describes the key elements of security for containerized applications.