What is containers as a service?

PaaS is concerned with and limited to code stack level infrastructure. When using PaaS, a project has no control over the underlying operating system. Container runtimes offer configuration and virtualization of the operating system, allowing for advanced customization and control. Containers can be critical to the development of highly customized and specialized software. Yet for more generic and standard software, PaaS is often the best choice.

PaaS is a cloud hosting paradigm that focuses on application-level code deployment. PaaS providers offer automated hosted environments that focus on higher level application infrastructure dependencies like language runtimes and databases. The “Platform” in PaaS is usually associated with a code language ecosystem, or a “stack”. Some examples of popular PaaS “stacks” are Ruby on Rails, Node.js, .NET, and Java Spring MVC. 

PaaS is typically  better suited for monolithic application deployments, since it generally focuses on a single stack per deployment. CaaS can be a better fit for for microservices since each container deployed to the CaaS can have its own encapsulated operating system and language stack. PaaS still suffers from the “works on my machine” problem. There can be subtle differences between the development environment and the production environment of a PaaS system. A container system’s primary goal is to avoid and ensure consistent behavior across underlying deployment environments.

Containers and CaaS make it much easier to deploy and compose distributed systems or microservice architectures. During development, a set of containers can manage different responsibilities or different code language ecosystems. The network protocol relationship between containers can be defined and committed for deployment to other environments. The promise of CaaS is that these defined and committed container architectures can be quickly deployed to cloud hosting.

To expand on this idea let’s explore an example. Imagine a hypothetical software system that is organized in a microservice architecture, where the services system are structured by business domain ownership. The domains of the services might be: payments, authentication, and shopping cart. Each one of these services has its own code base and are containerized. Using CaaS, these service containers can be instantly deployed to a live system.

Deploying containerized applications to a CaaS platform enables transparency into the performance of a system through tools like log aggregation and monitoring. CaaS also includes built in functionality for auto scaling and orchestration management. It enables teams to rapidly build high visibility and high availability distributed systems. In addition, CaaS increases team development velocity by enabling rapid deployments. Using containers insures a consistent deployment target while CaaS can lower engineering operating costs by reducing the DevOps resources needed to manage a deployment.

CaaS is a powerful modern hosting paradigm that requires familiarity with containers to utilize.  CaaS can be extremely beneficial to highly agile software development teams. It can be a great aide in establishing continuous deployment  on a project. You need not look far for a good CaaS, since most modern cloud hosting providers offer CaaS solutions at competitive prices.