What is a CaaS- Container as a Service?

The IT department of any company is always on the hunt for a platform that provides maximum security to its applications. How about you are given the option of simplifying the container management within the boundary of an infrastructure defined by software? 

CaaS, Container as a Service can be termed as a cloud service model that helps its users to organize, upload, scale, and then manage applications, containers, and clusters. CaaS comes with broad applications and is a blessing for IT departments.

What is a CaaS?

CaaS or Container as a Service falls under the category of cloud services in which the service providers make it possible for the users to deploy and manage containerized clusters and applications. Some people consider this platform to be a sub-type of IaaS, but the difference arises in the point CaaS’ main commodity is containers and not virtual machines or physical hardware.

The functions of the containers are essentially used to replace the traditional virtualization approach. Developers mostly use the containers to check the security and the health of the services in the application.

Key Advantages of a CaaS

Users from all across the globe are realizing the importance of a Container as a Service and hence the benefits of using it.

Security

With the containers isolated from one another, the security feature gets uplifted. If one application gets compromised, its bad effects cannot reach out to the other containers. The containers isolate the application processes from the operating system.

Portability

As an application is completed in a container, that created app gets everything in it to run efficiently. CaaS provides it with configuration files and dependencies. With portability, the end-users can launch the applications reliably in different environments.

Cost Savings

Containers do not require a separate operating system. Running only on some dozen megabytes, CaaS allows you to work with a single server and thereby lessens the cost considerably. Due to their high utilization levels, it also lowers bare metal costs.

Speed

Containers take only a second to start and create. The speed enables customers to respond to bugs quicker than ever before and also launches new versions of the software quickly.

The Best 5 CaaS Providers

Take a look at the following to know about the top-class CaaS providers in the market:

Google Kubernetes Engine

Primarily stylized as k8s, this is a container-orchestration open-source system and is used for automating application scaling, deployment, and management. Kubernetes works with a vast range of Docker-like tools and other CaaS, Container as a Service tools.

Defined as a set of primitives or building blocks, Google Kubernetes Engine can extensively meet different workloads. The platform maintains its control over storage resources. The user is assured with utmost reliability as Kubernetes lessens the time attributed to DevOps.

When deploying containers with the help of this platform, you are introduced to persistent storage for root images and databases. With its ecosystem of tools, Google Kubernetes Engine for hosting implementations based on microservices.

Amazon EC2 Container Service

This is hailed as a highly scalable performance container management service with very high performance. It not only supports Docker containers but also allows its users to run applications on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EC2 Container Service does both the launching and stopping of container-enable applications simply with the help of API calls.

You also get access to many features like EBS volumes, security groups, and IAM roles. For isolation policies, resource needs, and availability requirements, this platform is used by many companies. Amazon EC2 Container Service does away with the need to operate one’s cluster management or pay attention to the scaling of the management infrastructure.

Azure Container Service

If you want to save costs by shifting or lifting your already-existing applications to containers, Azure Container Service is the way to go for you! It builds microservices applications to deliver value to the customers quite fast. With Microsoft Azure, the user gets hold of the CI/CD tools and an end-to-end developing system. In no time, the containerized applications get updated or deployed with this.

You can be stuck anywhere in the modernization journey of the application, and Azure Container Service is there to accelerate your development process by taking care of the security requirements. Customers all across the world are satisfied with Azure Container products.

Docker Platform

Coming with a set of products with OS-level virtualization, Docker delivers software in packages that are termed as containers. All containers have their individual configuration files and are run by only one operating system kernel. Docker contains both premium and free tiers and is hosted by software named Docker Engine.

Mostly running on Linux servers, Docker not only packages the application but also includes its dependencies within a virtual container. This platform, an excellent provider and delivers portability and flexibility to the app and allows it to run in a public or a private cloud. Docker containers are lightweight and can run almost eight containers per host.

Rancher

An open-source software platform, Rancher enables companies to run containers in production. With this, neither organizations have to go through the trouble of developing container services platforms from scratch nor do they have to worry about using a separate set of open source technologies. Rancher can be defined as a complete software stack that is used by teams to adopt containers.

It mostly refers to the security and the operational challenges that become a part when managing many Kubernetes clusters. This platform gives integrated tools to DevOps teams so that they can run containerized workloads. Rancher unifies the clusters under centralized RBAC and also monitors them.

Clusters and containers are not only used in the form of services with this model but also are deployed in onsite data centers. With the features of CaaS, the developers easily construct scalable and security-rich containerized applications via the cloud or the on-premise data center. 

Conclusion

CaaS stands for Container as a Service and it’s a cloud service that helps developers deploy, run, scale, control, and stop containers by applying virtualization on container level.

The main advantages of using a CaaS are cost savings, enhanced security, portability, and speed. They are some really big players providing this service and the list includes Google Kubernetes, AWS Container Service, and Docker.

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