Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) is an emerging services offering for container-based virtualization in which providers offer a complete framework to customers for deploying and managing containers, applications and clusters.
The Containers-as-a-Service model is designed to help both developers and IT departments develop, run and manage containerized applications. In a CaaS model, containers and clusters are provided as a service that can be deployed in on-premises data centers or over the cloud.
For developers, a CaaS model streamlines the process of building a scaled-out container and applications deployment. For IT departments, Containers-as-a-Service offers a completely enabled container deployment service with security and governance control for IT management.
Container-as-a-Service Platforms and Providers
At the heart of a Containers-as-a-Service system is the container orchestration platform, which is designed to handle operations such as container deployment and cluster management. Popular examples of CaaS container orchestration platforms include Google Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Rackspace Carina, Apache Mesos and OpenStack s nova-docker.
CaaS platforms and providers often deliver container engines, orchestration and compute resources to companies as a service over a public cloud. Public cloud CaaS providers include Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its EC2 Container Service (ECS), Rackspace and IBM.
