We have been fiddling with IT infrastructure and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Bare metal servers and VMs are the key computing resources in IT centers. Now with the successful proliferation of containers, Container as a Service (CaaS) is becoming hugely popular and tantalizing. There are certain issues with PaaS in traditional environments. CaaS is being touted as the solution approach for surmounting the prickling issues of PaaS:

In the preceding figure, developers on the left-hand side are pulling and pushing application content from a library of trusted and curated base images. Operations teams on the right-hand side are monitoring and managing deployed applications and infrastructures. The two teams can collaborate through a toolset that allows for a separation of concerns while unifying the two teams through the application life cycle. The Docker platform is that toolset empowering to build a CaaS that fits varying business requirements.

Adding new technology components is greatly simplified. Let's say a company wants to add MongoDB to its portfolio. Now a certified image can be pulled down from Docker Hub and tweaked as needed, and then quickly deployed. This container can then be offered to developers for their consumption. Containers also allow for more experimentation. Since it is so easy to build and tear down containers, a developer can quickly compare the features of a stack component. For example, a developer wants to test the performance of three different NoSQL database technologies and they can simply fire up the appropriate container for each NoSQL technology without having to deal with the complexity of managing the infrastructure and the underlying technology stack. The developer could then run performance tests against each distinct container and select the appropriate one quickly.

Containers have the innate and incredible power to offer JVM-like portability in terms of completely abstracting the underlying infrastructure. A true CaaS model is to pave the way for the deployment of multi-container applications in multi-cloud environments.