Container platforms, broadly defined, are software solutions that allow you to manage containerized applications. They provide capabilities like automation, orchestration, governance, security, customization, and enterprise support for container architectures.
We can identify several types of container platforms:
- Container engines, like Docker and Docker Enterprise Edition, which provide a container runtime environment, allow you to create containers, manage container images, and perform basic operations.
- Container orchestrators, like Kubernetes, which allow you to manage, govern and automate containers at scale.
- Managed container platforms, like Google Kubernetes Engine, which augment container engine and orchestrator with additional services, like management of the orchestrator and underlying hardware resources.