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14 Containers For Dummies, HPE and Docker Special Edition These materials are © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. programmable software layer. While all this is happening, we have new infrastructure opportunities readily available, including containers. You can now harness all this power and transform it into chang- ing the relationship between hardware and software. Let's take a look at a couple of possibilities. Imagine an application that has wildly variable infrastructure needs depending on the time of day or time of year. Perhaps it's an ecommerce application or a tax-filing application. Each of these kinds of applications places demand on infrastructure that is highly variable. In December, for example, the tax-filing system has almost no demand, but that changes really quickly in April. With traditional infrastructure approaches, you'd need to build a data center that could handle the peak demand from these appli- cations. In other words, you'd have to throw a whole lot of money at hardware that might simply sit idle for the majority of the time. Plus, you'd need staff to keep an eye on usage patterns to deter- mine when they need to spin up systems to get additional servic- ing capacity. Also on the development front, what if you could employ new resources only when you need them? For example, suppose that Apple is using containers to power Siri. Each time someone makes a new request of Siri, a small container-based application is launched to handle that request, after which it's shut down and removed from use. Because containers boot very quickly, this is possible. Imagine trying to do that with a virtual machine! A user would have to wait for minutes for a virtual machine to boot before the request could be processed. What if your application could send the point at which current resources are becoming slim and simply launch new resources in the cloud for you? Maybe the web tier is getting overwhelmed and you need to be able to process more HTTP requests. With a fully programmable infrastructure, this kind of capability is at your fingertips.