5 Ways Companies Are Benefiting From Running Containers on OpenStack

More organizations are using containers in conjunction with their OpenStack clouds. Here are some of the benefits of doing so.

OpenStack includes the elements required for any cloud/data center management platform, regardless of whether containers, virtual machines or bare-metal servers are being used. These elements include multitenant security and isolation; management and monitoring; and storage and networking. With this kind of flexibility in support, OpenStack enables organizations to select and use the right tool for the job.

The OpenStack Containers team was formed with the specific purpose of advancing container technology in OpenStack. The team’s three top areas of focus are: 1) provide comprehensive support for running containerized workloads on OpenStack; 2) simplify the setup required for containers; and 3) provide an easy path to containers for organizations that are not yet ready to explore the technology.

Magnum provides container-specific APIs for multitenant containers as a service, Kolla provides a dynamic control plane in which each OpenStack service runs in a Docker container, and Murano enables packaged applications to be deployed on OpenStack. Development efforts for Magnum will be geared toward improving the operational experience, documentation and quality, as well as adding features such as bare-metal support, native Docker networking and load balancing. Future Kolla development, meanwhile, will focus on high availability, supporting additional OpenStack services and improved testing features.

Without some kind of monitoring and management framework, the compute units created during container development can get out of hand, resulting in “container sprawl.” IT administrators can find themselves dealing with orphaned containers sucking up system resources. Third-party ecosystem tools such as Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos can help prevent container sprawl. Through the Magnum project, OpenStack supports all three of these tools, which it refers to as Container Orchestration Engines (COEs). Magnum allows any of these COEs to be automatically provisioned in a collection of compute instances in which containers are run.

Containers and virtual machines are alike in many ways, but containers don’t have the same security isolation capabilities as virtual machines. Organizations can use a bay in OpenStack Magnum to arrange a group of virtual machines or bare-metal instances that are only used by one tenant to address this risk.