Complex applications with multiple microservices can be quickly deployed using container deployment. The container makes it easier to build and deploy the application more quickly as the environment is the same. Build the container in development mode, push to test, and then release to production. For hybrid cloud environments, container deployment is very useful. Containers make it easier to keep environments consistent across microservices. As microservices aren't always very resource-consuming, they can be placed together in a single instance to reduce cost.

Sometimes, customers have short workflows that require a temporary environment setup. Those environments may be queue systems or continuous integration jobs, which don't always utilize server resources efficiently. Container orchestration services such as Docker and Kubernetes can be a workaround, allowing them to push and pop containers onto the instance.

Docker's Lightweight container virtualization platform provides tools to manage your applications. Its stand-alone application can be installed on any computer to run containers. Kubernetes is a container orchestration service that works with Docker and another container platform. Kubernetes allows automated container provisioning and handles security, networking, and scaling aspects diligently.

Containers help the enterprise to create more cloud-native workloads, and public cloud providers such as AWS extend services to manage Docker containers and Kubernetes. The following diagram shows Docker's container management using Amazon Elastic Containers Service (ECS), providing a fully managed elastic service to automate the scaling and orchestration of Docker containers:

In the preceding diagram, multiple containers are deployed in a single Amazon EC2 virtual machine, which is managed through Amazon ECS and facilitates Agent Communication Service and cluster management. All user requests are distributed using a load balancer among the containers. Similarly, AWS provides Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to manage containers using Kubernetes.

Containers are a broad topic, and, as a solution architect, you need to be familiar with all of the available options. This section provides an overview of containers. However, you will need to deep dive further if you choose to utilize containers for your microservice deployment.

As of now, you have learned about various architecture patterns focusing on application development. Everyone has to agree that data is an integral part of any architecture design, and most of the architecture revolves around collecting, storing, and processing the visualization of data. Let's learn more about handling data in application architecture in the next section.