A9. Containerize workloads wherever possible.

We recommend containerization of applications wherever possible. Creating a deployment artifact that packages an application along with everything it needs to run facilitates rapid, repeatable, automated deployment (as we recommend elsewhere in this document), allows for increased confidence in automated testing due to identical test/prod environments, portability across platforms (If an app can be made to run in a container, it can probably be made to run in the cloud), and reduced risk of vendor-lock in due to the portability of containers across both disparate cloud environments and on-premises.