Hidden Truth About Containers and Their Management

The respondents of a recent DZone research stated that faster deployment time (77%) is the most significant benefit of containers, followed by improved scalability while building applications (75%) and greater modularity (64%). However, there are still lots of companies that are not using containers due to various reasons as lack of developers’ experience or need in modernizing legacy applications. Jelastic CEO, Ruslan Synytsky, shared his opinion about containers, their pros, and cons, as well as a possibility to ease the entry point for those who still don’t benefit from this technology.

Ruslan Synytsky:

Containers help developers to get their job done faster. How do they help? You can get ready-to-go pre-packaged templates, provision them and enjoy your work. However, it’s half of the truth. Containers are good for development, but when you go to production, you need production-ready templates: clustering, high availability, interconnecting of all these containers, configuring security, SSL, etc.

We hear feedback from developers that the containers are useful but they still hate to create and prepare containers, I mean specifically templates. This part is for system administrators, and they can take care of the configurations, preparation of templates for developers. And at the end, developers just pick containers or software stacks they need, and provision them quickly, and then enjoy their life and job.

Containers help system administrators to create right and optimized templates, and developers just use them. And for that, you need some kind of orchestration platform.

Currently, we have two options on the market: you go with Containers-as-a-Service or with Platform-as-a-Service. What is the difference?

Containers-as-a-Service provides you with an engine where you deploy your templates, but you create them by yourself. A system administrator is responsible for management of these container templates and for packaging them.

Platform-as-a-Service gives you the next level of automation, it provides the optimized templates for different use cases, for Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js etc. So you don’t need to spend the time on this routine and these complex tasks. It’s already prepared! You just choose stacks you need and go.

This is the main difference between PaaS and CaaS. In short, Container-as-a-Service gives you flexibility and Platform-as-a-Service gives you more automation. Choose whatever you need.

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