In a previous article on next-generation cloud technologies, I mentioned Containers as a Service (CaaS), which provides a framework to manage container and application deployment.
Brendan Burns, Google’s lead engineer for Kubernetes, introduced CaaS as a term for container platforms in his talk at the Defrag conference last year. An article on The New Stack describing the talk says CaaS environments like Kubernetes and Google Container Engine sit between the IaaS and PaaS environments. In Burns’s view, the article says, “CaaS falls into this middle ground as a way to connect to the machine but also offers the ability to make use of concepts that will impact how we think about application development on distributed architectures.”
Tools in the CaaS space are aimed at easing tension between development teams and operation staff when it comes to pushing application content and monitoring and managing applications and infrastructure, according to a recent Docker blog.
As Sam Ramji, CEO of Cloud Foundry, said in his keynote at OSCON last year, “we live in an age of open source datacenters, so we can stack all these things together and we have open source from the ground to ceiling.” For all of these things, Ramji maintains, the underlying goal is continuous innovation. But, he says, there can’t be continuous innovation if developers and operations staff spend their time trying to figure out how open source code components will work together.
Here are five projects and tools in the CaaS space aimed at making that open source stack easier to manage:
Amazon ECS — The Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) supports Docker containers and lets you run applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances.
CoreOS Tectonic — Tectonic combines the Kubernetes and CoreOS stack into a commercial distribution. It packages the components required to build a “Google-style infrastructure” and add commercial features such as a management console.
Docker Universal Control Plane — Docker Universal Control Plane is a container management solution for deploying and managing Docker applications in production environments.
Google Container Engine — Google Container Engine, which is built on Kubernetes, lets you run Docker containers on the Google Cloud platform. It schedules containers into the cluster and manages them based on user-defined requirements.
Project Magnum — Magnum is an OpenStack API service that makes container orchestration engines, such as Docker and Kubernetes, available as resources in OpenStack.
You can learn more about Containers as a Service and other next-gen cloud technologies in The Linux Foundation’s free “Cloud Infrastructure Technologies” course — a massively open online course now being offered through edX. Registration for this course is open now, and course content will be available in June.
