The following is the third blog in a series about software containers and Kubernetes, and their importance in modern application delivery.
So far in this series, we have explored why businesses are leveraging containers and the benefits that they bring. In this blog, we will examine container management platforms, what they are, and why they’re crucial for businesses that are leveraging containers.
Container management platforms vs. PaaS
Container management overlaps in some areas with platform as a service (PaaS) computing. While most have correctly viewed PaaS as a separate product segment, the differences between the two are quickly overlapping. PaaS models traditionally have developers in focus and try to establish a common way to package, deploy, and run applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
Many PaaS products in the market are actually adopting Kubernetes as their core application platform and providing additional services such as monitoring, service mesh, registries, cluster provisioning, and automating security updates.
Why you should use container management platforms
Teams within an organization will often start experimenting with containers by pulling down container images and running them on their local machines. They may then move on to sharing containers they’ve developed with other team members through a container registry. As proficiency grows, they may even wire several containers together and deploy them as a single unit.
As organizations start leveraging containers beyond the development/test phases and start adopting them in production, it becomes quickly apparent that additional tools are required to manage the containers effectively. This is where container management tools come into play.
Container platforms are a category of software tools that provide additional capabilities to deal with the complexity of running containers at a large scale across many servers. As a category, they’ve seen rapid adoption as the container technology has been democratized as a result of Docker and alternative image building/runtime tools. Kubernetes has seen the broadest adoption among the various container management tools and will be the main focus of this section.
In addition to the management features, Kubernetes enables applications to migrate seamlessly across environments. It’s quickly becoming the standard platform for developing cloud-native apps, whether within existing data centers, on private cloud, or on public cloud. This fact alone, thanks to the portability that abstracts away differences in the underlying platform, is driving significant adoption of Kubernetes.
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