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Red Hat Container Development Toolkit for container-based applications

Container Helpers

Article from ADMIN 38/2017

By Thorsten Scherf

Vagrant software makes it possible to set up a development environment quickly and efficiently. The Container Development Kit takes advantage of this feature to create a container-based environment built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux under Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.

In another article in the Features section of this issue, I addressed the subject of .NET development under Linux. The .NET Core is an open source project from Microsoft based on the .NET framework. As could be expected after the release of .NET Core, many Windows developers became interested in the idea of creating software directly under Linux. This approach works when it is clear from the beginning that a Linux system is used as the target platform for the .Net application. Unfortunately, developers under these circumstances frequently find that they have to build a corresponding platform by themselves. It is not clear how such a platform looks when finished, and the extent to which the platform is identical with the target platform is unknown, but these are topics for another day.

Containers serve as a solution for the platform construction issue if a development team creates and maintains the required container images. In addition to Red Hat, various Linux distributions offer preconfigured images that include different run times for the development of applications. Microsoft also entered the marketplace for images suitable for the operation of Windows-based application containers when the company released Windows 2016.

It goes without saying that it is important to identify the environment in which the container is supposed to run. In the Linux world, Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for managing and orchestrating containers. Diverse Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions are based on this framework. For example, Red Hat offers various versions of OpenShift [1], which is a Kubernetes-based PaaS platform. A word of caution is appropriate at this point: A fair amount of know-how and effort go into installing and configuring an environment of this kind.