1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,520 Imagine sitting down at a fancy $50 a plate restaurant 2 00:00:03,520 --> 00:00:06,800 and tearing into a 60-ounce steak with your teeth 3 00:00:06,800 --> 00:00:10,400 instead of cutting it. Not only would this be a pretty frustrating experience, 4 00:00:10,400 --> 00:00:16,400 but you'd probably be getting a look from your boss as he wonders why he's still letting you expense dinner. 5 00:00:16,400 --> 00:00:19,760 And as with steak, software becomes much easier to manage 6 00:00:19,760 --> 00:00:24,720 if you split it up into smaller chunks before eating or rather using it. 7 00:00:24,720 --> 00:00:28,520 This approach is actually used by lots of larger services today, 8 00:00:28,520 --> 00:00:33,960 where they split whatever it is they're providing into lots of small microservices. 9 00:00:33,960 --> 00:00:37,920 And our friends at IBM sponsored this video so we could tell you all about it. 10 00:00:37,920 --> 00:00:42,840 To explain what a microservice is, let's imagine you're using a site like Netflix. 11 00:00:42,840 --> 00:00:46,160 Every time you perform some small action on the website, 12 00:00:46,160 --> 00:00:49,360 skipping forward, logging in, paying a bill, 13 00:00:49,360 --> 00:00:53,840 all of these functions are handled by different dedicated microservices, 14 00:00:53,840 --> 00:00:59,800 a concept that Netflix actually pioneered and all of them are held in virtual containers. 15 00:00:59,800 --> 00:01:03,560 You see, the traditional way for a site to handle tons of users at once 16 00:01:03,560 --> 00:01:07,480 was to run lots of separate instances of the same code 17 00:01:07,480 --> 00:01:12,480 in virtual machines or VMs. You can learn more about virtualization in this video, 18 00:01:12,480 --> 00:01:15,640 but the basic idea is that a VM is a separate session 19 00:01:15,640 --> 00:01:19,160 of an operating system running inside another OS. 20 00:01:19,160 --> 00:01:22,200 And a typical server can run many VMs at once, 21 00:01:22,200 --> 00:01:25,680 which helps a great deal when many people are accessing a site. 22 00:01:25,680 --> 00:01:31,880 But running a full VM and the associated software that you need typically requires millions of lines of code. 23 00:01:31,880 --> 00:01:37,040 And oftentimes, a user wanting to complete just a simple task might require the server 24 00:01:37,040 --> 00:01:40,600 to open up more full VMs, which is pretty inefficient 25 00:01:40,600 --> 00:01:43,880 and can end up hogging CPU cycles and other resources. 26 00:01:43,880 --> 00:01:47,000 Microservices in containers, by contrast, 27 00:01:47,000 --> 00:01:50,680 only contain the code for a specific task. 28 00:01:50,680 --> 00:01:55,040 So we could be talking about just a few thousand lines of code instead of millions. 29 00:01:55,040 --> 00:01:59,280 Going back to our Netflix example, you might have one container for credit card 30 00:01:59,280 --> 00:02:05,680 authentication, another for the review system, another for the volume slider, and so on and so forth. 31 00:02:05,680 --> 00:02:09,720 So if lots of people are using certain microservices, 32 00:02:09,720 --> 00:02:15,120 the system can just create more instances of that specific container instead of having 33 00:02:15,120 --> 00:02:21,400 to open up more full-fat VMs. In fact, Google runs about 2 billion containers 34 00:02:21,400 --> 00:02:24,680 at any given time because they're so easy to scale, 35 00:02:24,720 --> 00:02:30,280 thanks in part to a system called Kubernetes, the Greek word for captain, which Google developed 36 00:02:30,280 --> 00:02:34,000 to manage containers automatically. And although this sounds like it might only be relevant 37 00:02:34,000 --> 00:02:38,960 to network engineers, it actually has real benefits for you, the home consumer. 38 00:02:38,960 --> 00:02:43,480 If there's a problem with a service, or if the developers want to add a new feature, 39 00:02:43,480 --> 00:02:46,520 they don't have to search through 10 million lines of code 40 00:02:46,520 --> 00:02:50,640 to find the issue and then possibly break the entire thing in the process. 41 00:02:50,640 --> 00:02:53,920 Instead, they can just change the one or two microservices 42 00:02:53,920 --> 00:02:59,280 that they want and leave the others untouched, meaning that fixes and new features can be pushed out quickly 43 00:02:59,280 --> 00:03:04,600 with less risk of causing other problems. The container paradigm also offers speed enhancements, 44 00:03:04,600 --> 00:03:07,760 as servers can run smaller microservices much more easily 45 00:03:07,760 --> 00:03:12,960 without tons of VMs slowing them down. This has backend reliability implications too, 46 00:03:12,960 --> 00:03:16,920 because it usually takes mere seconds to deal with a problematic container, 47 00:03:16,920 --> 00:03:21,080 meaning that the potential for lengthy amounts of downtime is lower. 48 00:03:21,080 --> 00:03:25,160 So all this means that containers are being used for tons of applications. 49 00:03:25,160 --> 00:03:29,680 Games like League of Legends and Fortnite rely heavily on containers to reduce lag 50 00:03:29,680 --> 00:03:34,880 by easing the load on their servers. And Pokemon Go also used containers to fix issues 51 00:03:34,880 --> 00:03:39,360 shortly after the game's launch and add new features without disrupting the millions of users 52 00:03:39,360 --> 00:03:43,280 who were playing the game at the time. Banks are also using containers with Kubernetes 53 00:03:43,280 --> 00:03:46,760 to handle loads of transactions at once without slowdowns, 54 00:03:46,760 --> 00:03:51,920 and even IBM's supercomputer, Watson, which has been heavily utilized in the healthcare industry, 55 00:03:51,920 --> 00:03:55,960 has transitioned to using containers instead of monolithic virtual machines. 56 00:03:55,960 --> 00:04:00,040 So it turns out that small containers have actually made life a lot easier, 57 00:04:00,040 --> 00:04:03,320 kind of like digital Tupperware. So thanks for watching guys, like, dislike, 58 00:04:03,320 --> 00:04:06,920 check out our other videos, leave a comment if you have a suggestion for a future video, 59 00:04:06,920 --> 00:04:09,960 and don't forget to subscribe and follow.