CaaS Platforms

What do CaaS platforms provide?

Let’s turn our attention to the Container as a Service (CaaS) space. As we have already discussed, CaaS offerings let you hit the ground running faster. They provide a managed service, where your starting point is a platform capable of running Dockerized applications.

In this area, Kubernetes is the king. It is the predominant orchestration service offered by providers. This means that once your Kubernetes workload cluster is up and running, you interact with it via the kubectl command to deploy, update, or scale your app. Similarly, your config manifests that describe the services you want running and how they should be connected will need to be in Kubernetes format.

Each offering is at a slightly different place in terms of features and maturity, so let’s review the major players.

Amazon Elastic Container Service

The odd one out in this list, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), sports Amazon’s own container orchestration layer rather than Kubernetes.