What Is Portainer?

Introduction

My first encounter with Portainer was back in 2018, when I managed a fleet of Docker Swarm clusters for a team of developers that was running an application composed of containerized microservices on top of it. Naturally, the team regularly needed to interface with its containers, and doing it through Docker’s CLI meant it was necessary to give the team access to the underlying Swarm nodes. It also required a lot of understanding of how Docker works to get access to logs or debug network issues between containers. But I thought this level of understanding shouldn’t be expected of application developers. So I started researching alternative ways to manage such an environment and make it easy to give people access to resources in a human-friendly but controllable way.

When my research ended, it led to two web-based solutions that seemed a good fit: Portainer and SwarmProm. I decided to give Portainer a try because of its simple installation procedure and the vibrant community it already had, which gave me a good feeling about its stability and feature completeness. So I set up a central Portainer instance running in Docker, connected the Docker Swarm clusters through Portainer’s Edge Agent, and configured appropriate access levels for the development team. In less than an hour, I had a web-based management UI that gave the developers access to their respective deployments, making their microservice architecture visible and digestible even for nonexperts. With a few ...