What Is Portainer?

Chapter 3. How Portainer Works

In the previous chapters, I laid out the foundations of modern software development and the challenges developers face. In this chapter I will briefly outline the most important functionality Portainer offers with regard to that problem space, and you will learn how Portainer helps you to manage the aforementioned challenges. If you want to go deeper on specific topics, many advanced resources are available, including Portainer’s official documentation, YouTube, and GitHub.

Portainer’s purpose is to enable you and your team to easily and securely manage containerized workloads in different environments. It abstracts away as much of the complexity as possible while enabling you to dive deeper and interface with the container orchestration engine. In this chapter you will learn the basics of how Portainer works, and how it enables you to manage hundreds of environments with hundreds of people and securely deploy your applications while keeping your sanity.

Managing Different Container Environments

In Portainer, a single container orchestration system is called an environment. Portainer allows you to manage many of these environments to which you can deploy your application containers (see Figure 3-1).

It supports the following types of environments:

Docker

Standalone Docker hosts as well as Docker Swarm clusters

Kubernetes

Standard Kubernetes clusters

ACI

Azure Container Instances

Nomad

HashiCorp Nomad clusters

KaaS

Managed Kubernetes clusters offered ...