What is Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS explained)?

The introduction of CaaS

A container is a set of software that includes all dependencies: code, runtime, configuration and system libraries, so it can run on any host system. CaaS enables software teams to rapidly deploy and scale containerized applications to cloud infrastructures.

CaaS is essentially the automated hosting, deployment and monitoring of containerized software packages. Without CaaS, software development teams must deploy, manage and monitor the underlying infrastructure on which the containers run. This infrastructure is a set of on-premises cloud or VMS, bare-metal or instance servers and network routing systems, which require dedicated DevOps resources to monitor and manage.

CaaS enables development teams to think at the top level of containers instead of managing the infrastructure below. This provides development teams with greater transparency of the final product, enabling more agile development and greater added value for the customer.

The benefits of CaaS

Containers and CaaS make it much easier to deploy and compose distributed systems or microservice architectures. Unlike a monolithic application built as a single unified unit, a microservices architecture is a collection of smaller, independently deployable services.

During development, a set of containers can handle different responsibilities or different code language ecosystems. The promise of CaaS is that these defined and committed container architectures can be rapidly deployed to cloud hosting.

Imagine a hypothetical software system organized in a microservices architecture, where system services are structured by business domain. The service domains might be: payments, authentication and shopping cart. Each of these services has its own code base and is containerized. Using CaaS, these service containers can be instantly deployed on a live system.

Deploying containerized applications on a CaaS platform provides transparency on system performance, thanks to tools such as log aggregation and monitoring. CaaS also includes built-in auto-scaling and orchestration management capabilities. It enables teams to rapidly build distributed systems with high visibility and availability. What's more, CaaS increases teams' development speed by enabling rapid deployments. The use of containers guarantees a consistent deployment target, while CaaS can reduce engineering operating costs by reducing the DevOps resources needed to manage a deployment.