Microservices vs. Containers in Streaming Deployment

Learn more about microservices at Streaming Media East 2020.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Nermeen Ismail: I definitely built a microservice-based system before containers were productized, right? So, it wasn't containers. You run your microservice as a process in a VM. It's just very hard to scale that, to deploy that, especially when you have multiple environments that you have to deploy in. It's just very, very hard to do that. Containers help you with that. So, containers are a way to package your microservice in a way that is repeatable. So, whatever you are testing, whatever you are putting in your development environment, in your station environment, is the same that's in your production. So, you know that it's the right thing.

So there are definitely services that are packaged as containers, that you can get. For most of what we do, we need two differentiate between what is context and what is core in what we are building. So, core is where we can add value that you cannot get from just putting things, and integrating things together. But we will get whatever we can, as long as it's in the context of what we are doing. And then we add the value-add to that. And I think that's very important because you can then go much, much faster if you can leverage other things. Especially as all those things, stuff to do with security, you don't want to be doing it. Not only because maybe you're not the expert in that, but because you want to use pieces that are hardened. You know it has been tested, it works, and it's ready to go.

Dom Robinson: Tanu, so, mindset: Are you able to buy lots of services from the market and integrate them? Or is it still a strong balance in terms of rolling your own?

Tanu Aggarwal: So, my belief is that right now in the industry, we're in a place where you can easily make your containers based on the services that the cloud services, the public cloud services provide. The whole idea of containers and microservices is, what is your core competency? We let you focus on your core competency, and make your container, for whatever it is, the product that you're building and bringing to the market. And you can leave everything else that you need to the cloud providers. So again, it's in a place where I think we can come up, we can create our own core competencies and containers. And yes, we can start selling them as well. I completely agree with Olga and Nermeen: You want to leave certain things to the experts, and why reinvent the wheel? So, I think that's where containers are helping out.