Chapter 2. Introduction to containers and orchestration with Kubernetes 19
Whether your enterprise application is a modernized traditional application or a cloud-native, 
12-factor application, Multicloud Manager provides a consistent way to deploy your 
application across clusters. Placement policy provides control of deployment that is based on 
several factors. Multicloud Manager uses CAM services to provision, configure, and deliver 
individual Kubernetes clusters as a service in any cloud that CAM supports.
Multicloud Manager and CAM are offered as part of the IBM Cloud Pak™ for Multicloud 
Management. For more information, see Chapter 3, “IBM Cloud Paks: Middleware anywhere” 
on page 37.
2.3  Containers
Interconnected applications and services are the primary focus in 21st century. Services 
availability is a key user expectation. Availability, scalability, resilience, and security are some 
of the primary requirements for all service providers. All of these features demand platform 
availability where operational overhead is a major challenge.
Operating system virtualization (see Figure 2-8) is a significant step to achieve optimal 
resource utilization with reduced operation management effort. Container services are a step 
further to ensure higher availability of services with minimal operation management 
overhead. Containers are facilitating rapid and agile software development, testing, and 
deployment. 
Figure 2-8   Containerized applications
2.3.1  What are containers?
A container is the object for encapsulating or packaging up software code, along with all 
required dependencies, so that it can run uniformly and consistently on any infrastructure. 
This abstraction away from the operating system makes the container highly portable to run 
across any platform or cloud and clear of any issues. A container is also termed as 
lightweight, considering that the same operating system kernel is shared across multiple 
instances of containers. 
A portability feature is also known as Write once and run anywhere, which is important in 
context to development process and compatibility with other dependent software stack. 
Containerization improved security and efficiently of code development with the adoption of 
Docker and DevOps.