In his position as director of platform engineering with MetLife in Raleigh, NC, Jeff Murr guides a host of targeted solutions in areas such as cloud adoption and infrastructure utilization. Jeff Murr and his Raleigh, NC, team focus on ensuring that containers and open-source platforms are designed and implemented for optimal efficiency.

At their core, containers are devised to solve the problem of seamlessly running software in a variety of computing environments. This is a critical issue, especially given the emergence of private and public cloud environments that work in tandem with physical machines located in data centers. When the supporting software environment is not identical, inconsistencies often arise that can impact functionality. 

Containers address this issue by packaging a full runtime environment within an application platform that also includes the libraries, configuration files, and dependencies required to run it. This approach overcomes the differences between infrastructure and OS distributions in a more efficient way than virtual machines, which have a hypervisor coordinating various operating systems. 

Containerization also allows for maximum modularity, with complex applications split into component parts such as the application front-end and the database. This maximizes efficiency and ensures that microservices can be instantiated at almost the exact moment when they are needed.