As mentioned previously, one of the benefits of containers is that they are extremely portable. This also means that containers can be hosted on numerous platforms and technologies.

To run the containers, there are a lot of options that will vary according to your use case. Some of these options are as follows:

• Azure App Services
• Azure Service Fabric
• Docker Swarm
• Docker Desktop
• Kubernetes

Depending on the demands of the application/container, it could run on all the options mentioned in the preceding list.

The images used to run containers (container images) also need to be hosted. These images are hosted in a so-called container registry. In a container registry, they are published privately or publicly. The two most well-know registries are the Docker Registry and the Azure Container Registry within the Azure platform.

Now that we have gone through some of the background information regarding containers, we are ready to go more deeply into the techniques behind containers and find out what is needed to create a custom container image.