Abstract. The emergence of cloud computing and the evolution into service-based solutions across the software industry have influenced many changes in software development paradigms and methods. As a result, various forms of virtualization and container-based solutions have become more and more commonplace throughout the field, with technologies and frameworks such as Docker and Kubernetes becoming industry standard solutions to virtualization.
This thesis is a literature review into existing research on virtualization and containers, and their use in various categories of the software industry. The aim of the thesis is to look at the reasons for the proliferation of virtual machines and containers, along with their benefits for the software development process, the continuous integration and delivery pipeline, and the different cloud platforms and providers.
The benefits of virtualization are clearest in the cloud infrastructure, as cloud services are inherently built to utilize virtual machines. Containers and container orchestration systems allow container management and dynamic resource allocation, improving efficiency and reducing costs. In software development and testing, the modular and self-contained nature of containers allows for faster iteration and more problem-averse development. And finally, in the continuous integration and delivery pipelines, containers and container management tools allows automation, and lower overhead and complexity, enabling lower-threshold software deployment. Along with enabling cloud infrastructure as it exists today, the evolution of virtualization and containers in the software industry provide benefits across the board
