What Is a Container? A Definition

Lorna Garey | Senior Writer | April 3, 2025

In This Article

Containers and containerization are key to an agile, resilient cloud native architecture. Why focus on cloud native now? One reason is that, by building applications in a cloud-agnostic way, you can deploy and manage your workloads in a multicloud environment to enhance resilience, optimize costs, and choose the best provider for each application. Let’s look at one enabling technology.

What Is a Container?

Containers are a lightweight and portable form of virtualization technology used to segment applications into smaller, independent services that can be developed, deployed, updated, and scaled independently. Containers are fast—they store just enough of the service’s environment to be able to start and stop quickly. They are the building blocks of cloud native applications.

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