Containerization Explained
Technology is constantly evolving. This presents businesses with a critical challenge: how to keep complex, long-standing systems running smoothly while still innovating and adapting to new demands. It’s like trying to upgrade the engine of a car, or change its tires, while the same car is heading down the highway at 70 miles an hour. One of the most impactful solutions to address this challenge that has emerged in recent years is a concept called containerization. While the term may sound technical, its value is very practical — especially for companies running large, mature systems that are critical to daily operations.
What Is Containerization (in Plain English)?
Think of a container like a shipping container, but for software. Just as physical containers allow goods to be packed, stacked, and shipped efficiently across the world — regardless of what’s inside — software containers package up all the code and dependencies an application needs to run. These containers can then be moved, duplicated, or updated without worrying about the underlying environment they’re running on. They behave the same everywhere.
Imagine you had a favorite recipe that required very specific ingredients and kitchen tools. Instead of trying to recreate the recipe in a new kitchen every time (which might lack the tools or use slightly different ingredients), you packed up everything needed — ingredients, cookware, even the oven — and moved it all in one portable box. That’s what a container does for software.
But what value do containers provide in the real world?
Mature technologies, such as the ad tech ecosystem that process trillions of data points per day, are complex, tightly coupled, and often built on legacy platforms. Many of these solutions have grown organically through years of iteration or acquisition. Changing them is hard, risky, and time-consuming. Containerization can have a significant impact on reducing these risks, along with a number of other benefits.
- Stability and Consistency: Containers eliminate the “it works on my machine” problem. Whether a container runs on a developer’s laptop, a test server, or a production environment, it behaves the same way. This consistency reduces bugs and makes it easier to deploy updates with confidence.
- Isolation Without Interruption: Large systems often have many moving parts. With containers, each part can run independently. That means one team can update or fix a component without disrupting the rest of the system. It’s like being able to renovate your kitchen without tearing down the whole house.
- Faster, Safer Modernization: Many organizations want to modernize parts of their systems without rewriting everything from scratch. Containerization allows teams to isolate old and new components, enabling a gradual upgrade. You can containerize legacy applications and start migrating them to modern platforms step-by-step.
- Scalability and Resilience: If a container crashes, it can be restarted instantly. If traffic spikes, new containers can be spun up to handle the load. This makes systems more reliable and responsive without requiring massive hardware investments or manual intervention.
- Better Use of Resources: Containers are lightweight. Unlike traditional virtual machines that carry an entire operating system, containers share the host system’s core but still stay isolated. This makes it easier to run more applications on the same hardware, reducing infrastructure costs.
You don’t need to understand the technical mechanics of containers to appreciate their impact. They allow engineering teams to innovate faster, reduce risk, and lower costs — all while improving system reliability. That’s a win for everyone.
Bringing Containers to the World of Programmatic Advertising
With all these clear value propositions, it is no wonder that there is a desire to bring this technology into the programmatic ecosystem. For ad tech companies navigating increasing regulatory pressure, heightened competition, and more demand for interoperability, containerization is a powerful way to future-proof their systems without halting momentum.
To support this desire, IAB Tech Lab has created the Containerization Project Working Group to formalize standards for interoperability across the programmatic advertising ecosystem to facilitate easier and faster adoption of containers to easily plug in services required to consummate an auction process namely, Inventory Description, Bid Request Enrichment, User container(s), Material Instructions, and Bid Valuation.
The goal of the working group is to produce a set of standard interface and service definitions, reference architectures and best practices for integration of containers by a party involved in the programmatic advertising supply chain.
IAB Tech Lab welcomes industry collaboration to make this a successful initiative. To join this group, please email memberships@iabtechlab.com.
Miguel Morales
Director, Addressability & PETs
IAB Tech Lab