Managed Containers

Managed Containers: The key to agile deployment

Our Managed Container Applications Services

Companies’ requirements for container services can be very different, depending on the situation they are starting from. Some customers want a partner who relieves them completely of the management of the application. Others prefer to perform certain tasks themselves, such as deploying or monitoring an application.

We support you in the development and realisation of your cloud-native projects and enable flexible cooperation based on a shared responsibility model. Depending on your individual needs, you can choose between fully managed, co-managed and self-managed approaches or a flexible combination of these options.

Our different service models allow you a great amount of freedom in managing your microservices landscape and offer flexible answers to future challenges.

White Box: This is the most comprehensive service approach. Claranet is familiar with the internal structure of an application and has the skills to ensure secure and reliable operation at the application level. SLAs are provided on the availability of the application itself.

Grey Box: In this model, responsibilities are shared between the customer and Claranet: the customer is in charge of the application. Claranet sees the respective application as a “Black Box” and assumes operational responsibility, e.g. monitoring on a container basis. SLAs are provided on the platform and on incident response times, but not on the application level.

Black Box: This model is an alternative to the Grey Box approach in terms of remuneration and service level. The company receives support in the form of know-how and hands-on services at cost. Claranet offers first-level support, which means that it is mainly incidents that are displayed.

No Box: This is a purely self-managed approach, e.g. for prototypes or proofs of concept. Claranet only offers the platform, which the customer operates themselves. Application management is not included in this model.

What are containers?

Unlike virtual machines, containers do not emulate the hardware, but the operating system. Virtualisation thus takes place at a higher level, without a hypervisor.

Several isolated containers can be operated within an operating system installation. A container requires significantly fewer resources than a virtual machine here. In addition, emulating the operating system is less complex than emulating a complete hardware. Containers contain both applications and the required operating system components (libraries). They provide the applications with a complete runtime environment. Essential components of containerisation are images, registry and orchestration:

• Images: An image is the basis from which a container is created. It guarantees portability: For example, images can be transported smoothly from the development system to the live system. A container image contains all components to run an application platform-independently.
• Registry: Images are made available via a registry, a web service that stores, manages and makes images available. The well-known public registry Docker Hub is provided by Docker.
• Orchestration: The management of containers across multiple systems is performed with additional software such as Docker Swarm or Kubernetes. Claranet realises effective management as well as monitoring and simple scale-out of containers with Kubernetes.

Managed Containers are another step towards perfect DevOps

By using containers, the continuous delivery pipeline can be much more tightly integrated. This increases developer agility and further improves collaboration with the Ops team. While a high degree of automation already exists in today’s deployment through DevOps methods and tools, the complex deployment and testing causes some problems due to different topologies, parameters and software versions. Containers solve these problems through their platform independence and statelessness.