Container Management Software

Container management is the process of managing the creation, deployment, scaling, availability, and destruction of software containers. Managing these containers can prove to be a challenge. Container management software helps optimize how and where to run containers as well as which systems to put them on.

A container is a standard way to package your application's code and associated dependencies and configurations into a virtual container. They help solve the problem of moving software from one computing environment or operating system (OS) to another. The container serves as a self isolated unit that can run anywhere that supports it. Regardless if the host OS is UNIX or non-UNIX, the container will specify what OS will be used internally by the container.

Container-based virtualization is an alternative to hypervisor-based virtualization. In the more traditional virtualization model, the hypervisor creates and runs multiple instances of an operating system so that multiple operating systems can be run on a single physical machine sharing the hardware resources. This is known as a virtual machine (VM). This VM process is memory and processor intensive.

The container model eliminates hypervisors entirely. Containers contain not just the application, but everything that it needs to run including runtime, system libraries, etc. All the containers share the resources of a single operating system and there is no virtualized hardware. Since the host operating system (or kernel) is shared by all containers, they are more efficient than VMs. It’s possible to host far more containers on a single host than VMs.

There are other advantages of choosing containers over VMs. Containers sharing a single operating system kernel start-up in a few seconds, instead of the minutes required to start-up a virtual machine. Containers are scalable, have a small disk size, and are very easy to share.

The pricing structure for container management software is very complex and is best estimated by contacting the vendor. You can obtain basic open source container management software, but most charge on some variation of per node or instance running per year.