What is a CaaS? Containers as a Service, Defined

What is a CaaS? Containers as a Service, Defined


When public clouds first began gaining popularity, it seemed that providers were quick to append the phrase “as a service” to everything imaginable, as a way of indicating that a given application, service, or infrastructure component was designed to run in the cloud.

It should therefore come as no surprise that “Containers as a Service,” or CaaS, refers to a cloud-based container environment. But there is a bit more to the CaaS story than this. CaaS is not just a marketing fad. Below, I explain what CaaS means, and why it’s valuable.

CaaS Differentiators

Containers as a Service offerings are often about more than just giving IT pros a way of running their containerized applications in the cloud. Each cloud provider is free to create its own flavor of CaaS—and some CaaS platforms don’t run in a major public cloud. There are two main areas in which CaaS providers try to differentiate their offerings. First, there is the user interface. On-premises container environments tend to be managed through the Docker command line. However, some IT pros prefer a GUI-based management interface over the command line. As such, some cloud providers allow subscribers to point-and-click their way through container creation and management.

A second key differentiator between CaaS providers is orchestration, and the supplementary services that are attached to the orchestration engine. A provider may use an orchestration engine, for example, to achieve automatic scaling for containerized workloads, based on the parameters that the administrator has established. Similarly, a cloud provider’s orchestration engine may be used to handle container lifecycle management tasks, or the creation of container-related reports. It is worth noting that public cloud container services can be somewhat rigid with regard to orchestrator selection. Microsoft Azure, for example, allows you to choose between DC/OS, Kubernetes, and Swarm. No other selections are available. In contrast, other container management platforms, such as Rancher, are designed to be modular rather than limiting you to using a few pre-defined choices.

The Advantages of Using CaaS

Many of the advantages that Containers as a Services brings to the table are similar to the benefits of general container usage. However, there are at least two extra benefits that CaaS provides. The first of these benefits is that CaaS makes it much easier to run applications in the cloud than it might otherwise be. Applications that were designed for on-premises use do not always behave as expected when installed on a cloud-based virtual machine. Because containers allow for true application portability, however, it is possible to create an application container, test the newly containerized application on-premises, and then upload the application to the public cloud. The containerized application should work in the same way in the cloud as it does on-premises. Another advantage to using CaaS is that doing so allows organizations to achieve a greater degree of agility. Agility is one of those overused IT buzzwords that has kind of lost its meaning. However, I tend to think of agility as the ability to roll out a new production workload as quickly as possible. Given this definition, CaaS definitely delivers. Imagine for a moment that an organization’s development staff is building a new application, and that there is a pressing need for the application to be rolled out quickly. The developers could containerize the application, but what if the organization is not yet using containers in production? Better still, what happens if the organization’s container environment lacks the capacity to host the application? This is where CaaS really shines. Public cloud providers usually let you deploy a container environment with just a few mouse clicks. This eliminates time-consuming tasks such as deploying container hosts, building clusters, or testing the container infrastructure. Cloud providers use automation to provision for their subscribers’ container environments that have been proven to be configured correctly. This automation eliminates the time-consuming setup and testing process, and therefore allows the organization to begin rolling out containerized applications almost immediately.

Multi-Cloud Solutions

Although it is tempting to think of CaaS as solely being a service that a cloud provider offers to its customers, it is becoming increasingly common for organizations to host containers on multiple clouds. Doing so can help with resilience to failure, and with load balancing. Yet hosting containers on multiple clouds also introduces significant challenges related to cross-cloud container management, and cross-cloud workload scaling. These challenges can be addressed by using management tools such as those from Rancher, which can manage containers both on-premises and in the cloud.

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