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The cloud-computing paradigm based on containers has progressively grown in recent years as a flexible strategy that has proven to be energy efficient. The increasing usage of the container as a service technology in data centers (DCs) among cloud providers highlights the necessity of the container installation design phase in cloud environments. Cloud providers attempt to enhance resource utilization and reduce energy consumption by employing various VM selection and placement policies. This procedure for placement acquires a new aspect, with containers now being deployed on virtual machines (VMs) and those guest VMs being installed on physical machines (PMs). The intricacy of this issue increases when the variety of the containers, VMs, and PMs is taken into account. In this paper, an optimal placement strategy for containers is proposed based on the bio-inspired algorithms. The firefly algorithm has been modified to use discretization strategy (Discrete Firefly Algorithm, DFF) and has also used local search mechanism (Discrete Firefly with Local Search Mechanism, DFFLSM). The proposed versions of firefly algorithm are compared with first fit, first fit decreasing, random algorithm and ant colony algorithm. The comparison is done based on average energy consumption, average active VM, average active PM and average overall service-level agreement violations in the DC. The results show that DFFLSM performs better than all pre-existing container placement algorithms in terms of energy efficiency. It reduces average energy consumption of DC by 9.32% and 40.85% and average active PM by 18.30% and 21.89% in homogenous and heterogeneous environment, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]