advantage. Google’s GKE provides a managed Kuber-
netes offering, where the control plane is managed by
Google, with the cloud user managing the worker
nodes (the same path that Azure and AWS chose to
replicate). However, where Google does outshine its
competition is around additional integration ser-
vices, such as integrated logging and monitoring via
Stackdriver, auto-upgrade functionality, GPU sup-
port and a mature container registry.
In addition to the services above, Google just recently
released (under alpha) the ability to run GKE
on-premises,
hence-
forth enabling their
own hybrid container
architecture. Further-
more, Google’s contin-
ued investment in their
Cloud Services Plat-
form, providing users
with a simplified service
mesh for micro services
via Istio, and serverless
add-ons via Knative
makes them the most
mature public cloud
operator when it comes
to
container-based
services.
is to bring Docker to the enterprise, providing users
with the ability to deploy an enterprise-ready plat-
form across a variety of infrastructure solutions, both
in the cloud and on-premises (virtual and bare metal).
It does so by simplifying the deployment of an end-
to-end stack with all the necessary components,
such as the container engine, a choice of container
orchestrator (Swarm or Kubernetes), a management
control plane and its own secret sauce. This is a com-
prehensive lifecycle management toolkit (with con-
tainer registry, image scanning, secrets manage-
ment, etc.), also called their
Secure Software Supply
Chain.
Container services
provide a great
starting point without
having to worry about
cluster management,
resource provisioning
or having a minimum
platform deployed.
Containers as a Service Solutions
Recently, pure-play container vendors have simpli-
fied the deployment of CaaS platforms in multi-cloud
environments with pre-configured and tested
deployment scripts. So, are managed container ser-
vices worth the platform lock-in? Let's find out.
Docker EE
Docker, Inc., the company behind the Moby Project,
one of the most influential within the CNCF, has its
own enterprise grade CaaS solution known as Docker
Enterprise Edition (Docker EE). The goal of Docker EE
34 | THE DOPPLER | FALL 2018
In addition to the above,
Docker announced the
ability to federate cross-
cloud Kubernetes plat-
forms (EKS, AKS, GKE) and
to use their management
tools to unify one’s con-
tainer lifecycle manage-
ment, along with a variety
of tools to simplify con-
tainer
creation
and
deployment.
The Docker EE platform
has matured significantly in the last two years pro-
viding enterprise users with all the core functionality
they have come to expect from a mature product.
With the introduction of Kubernetes as a supported
orchestrator and cross platform federation, organi-
zations can now cater to those developers and purists
who have a natural inkling toward K8s. Finally, with
Docker's already well thought out security and man-
agement components—such as RBAC, trusted registry
and cross-platform deployments—enterprises look-
ing for an easy to deploy container platform should
really consider Docker EE as a platform to move
ahead with.