Configuration
Management
Toolbox
Management Monitoring
Security Logging
Universal Control Plane
Source Code
Management
CI/CD
Content Trust, RBAC, LDAP/AD, SSO
Registry Service
Trusted Registry
Orchestration
Swarm
Container Runtime
Engine
Content
Operating Systems
Virtualization
Physical/Converged
Infrastructure
Figure 3: Containers as a Service
Source: Docker
components requires a great deal of up-front work. There are a number of
third party solutions for container management that strive to greatly stream-
line and simplify the integration and management of containers. However, the
initial effort should not be underestimated.
Containers as a Service (CaaS) is Docker’s answer to the prescriptive chal-
lenges of PaaS. CaaS allows you to roll your own PaaS without being as pre-
scriptive. CaaS allows you to abstract the technology components of your
choice into containers and integrates all of the containers into a common plat-
form so that developers are shielded from all of the underlying complexity.
In response, traditional PaaS solutions like Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry now allow
you to pick and choose what components in the stack you want to manage
yourself and which ones you want the PaaS solution to manage. You can make
compelling arguments for both approaches. One of the biggest advantages of
CaaS over traditional PaaS (Cloud Foundry, Heroku, etc.) is cost. With CaaS, you
pay for support and possibly subscription fees for various ecosystem tools.
PaaS charges a premium for their services.
Welcome to a World of Serverless
Serverless, or functions as a service (FaaS) totally changes the abstraction
game. With serverless, you invoke functions and all of the infrastructure is pro-
vided for you on demand. No setting up AMIs, patching, deploying virtual
machines, etc. No more large up front enterprise agreements.
FaaS is a simple pay-as-you-go service that requires a minimal amount of
administration and management. Serverless is relatively new and immature
and has its limitations. Testing can be complex and the tools to help in this area
are not yet robust. Serverless is also known to be inefficient with long-running
applications.
40 | THE DOPPLER | FALL 2017
Service Discovery
Networking
Volumes
Infrastructure
Public Cloud
Storage