Running applications in containers brings a number of benefits:
Once you have tested your containerized application you can deploy it to any other system where a compatible container engine is running and you can be sure that your application will perform exactly as it did when you tested it.
Although virtual machines are an alternative to containers, the fact that containers do not contain an operating system (whereas virtual machines do) means that containers have much smaller footprints than virtual machines, are faster to create, and quicker to start.
The portability and performance benefits offered by containers can help you make your development process more agile and responsive. Enhancing your continuous integration and continuous delivery processes to take advantage of containers and technology such as Visual COBOL Build Tools for Windows makes it easier for you to deliver the right software at the right time. Visual COBOL Build Tools for Windows is a component of Visual COBOL which provides all of the functionality of Visual COBOL to enable you to compile, build, and test COBOL code but without the overhead of an IDE.
A container that contains one of your applications also includes the relevant versions of any supporting software that your application requires. If other containers contain applications that require different versions of the same supporting software, that isn't a problem because the different containers are totally independent of one other.
This also means that as you move through the various stages of your development lifecycle, you can have total confidence that an image you create during development will perform exactly the same as it moves through testing and potentially to your users.
You can quickly create new containers if demand for your applications requires them. When using multiple containers you can take advantage of a range of container management options. See the container engine's documentation for more information on these options.