Distributed Systems

Containers

Containerise your applications with Docker and Kubernetes for portability, scalability and efficiency, with consistent deployments in any environment.

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Traditional application hosting brings inefficiencies, dependency conflicts and slow updates. Containers change that. We help businesses containerise their applications, enabling seamless deployment, portability and management across every environment, from a developer’s laptop to production.

What are containers?

Containers are lightweight, portable, self-sufficient units that package an application together with everything it depends on. That guarantees consistency across development, testing and production, eliminating the classic “it works on my machine” problem.

Three ideas make the approach powerful. Containerisation encapsulates applications with their dependencies for consistency across environments. Orchestration manages containerised applications at scale using tools like Kubernetes and Docker Swarm. And containers pair naturally with a microservices architecture, where each modular service is built, shipped and scaled independently. Together they deliver improved efficiency, faster deployments and seamless scalability.

Challenges we help you with

Containerisation brings clear benefits, but the migration can be challenging. Whatever the problem, we can help you over the hurdles:

Security and compliance: we implement security best practices to protect containerised workloads, from image scanning to access controls.
Legacy application migration: we modernise traditional, monolithic applications into well-managed containers without disrupting operations.
Monitoring and troubleshooting: we implement real-time observability so you can track performance and diagnose issues quickly, with ongoing monitoring available beyond go-live.
Networking and storage: we configure efficient container networking and persistent storage, using services such as Azure Files and AWS EBS and EFS.
CI/CD integration: we’re big fans of using your new containers as the foundation for continuous integration pipelines, enabling practices like contract testing and quality engineering.

Why choose Next2Software for containerisation?

We specialise in Docker, Kubernetes and modern orchestration tooling, and every deployment strategy is tailored to your infrastructure and business needs. Security is built in: encryption, access controls and compliance follow best practice from day one. The underlying environments are typically defined with infrastructure as code, so they’re as repeatable as the containers running on them. The result is an architecture ready to scale and adapt as your business changes.

If deployments are slow, fragile or inconsistent, containerisation is usually the fastest route to fixing all three. Tell us about your applications and we’ll map out the move to containers.

The benefits

The benefits of Containers

What you gain when containers is delivered by Next2Software.

Seamless portability

Run applications anywhere (on-premises, in the cloud or both) without changing a line of code.

Accelerated deployment

Automated builds and releases reduce downtime and manual intervention on every deploy.

Dynamic scaling

Scale applications up or down instantly to meet demand, without over-provisioning.

Isolation & security

Isolated workloads reduce attack surfaces and stop one application's problems affecting another.

Works on their machine, fails on yours?

Dependency conflicts and inconsistent environments waste engineering time. Containers package everything an application needs, so it behaves the same everywhere.

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FAQs

Frequently asked questions

Containers are far more lightweight and efficient because they share the host operating system's kernel rather than each running a full OS. You still get application isolation, but with faster start-up times, smaller footprints and better use of your hardware.

Containers isolate workloads from one another, reducing the attack surface if any single application is compromised. Because images are built from code, security controls and patching can be automated and applied consistently across every deployment.

Yes. Legacy applications can usually be containerised with the right planning and optimisation. We assess each application, untangle its dependencies and configuration, and move it into containers without disrupting the business.

Kubernetes is the most widely used platform for managing containers at scale, alongside Docker Swarm and OpenShift. We help you choose the right orchestration approach for your workloads; sometimes a managed cloud service is the simplest answer.

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Let's build something great.

Tell us what you're trying to achieve and we'll map out the right approach. No jargon, no hard sell.

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