Containers as a Service

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What Does Containers as a Service Mean?

Containers as a service (CaaS) is a cloud service model that allows users to manage and deploy containers, applications and clusters through container-based virtualization. CaaS is highly useful to IT departments and developers in building secure and scalable containerized applications. With CaaS, this can be achieved using on-premises data centers or over the cloud.

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Techopedia Explains Containers as a Service

Simply speaking, CaaS provides an easy way to set up a container cluster. Orchestration, which essentially automates key IT functions, is an essential quality of CaaS technology. Google Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Rackspace Carina and Apache Mesos are all examples of CaaS orchestration platforms. Some public cloud CaaS providers include Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace and IBM.

CaaS is often considered to be a subset of IaaS (infrastructure as a service), but includes containers as its fundamental resource, as opposed to bare metal systems and virtual machines.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.