Containerisation is a modern, lightweight approach to hosting services — more efficient than traditional virtualisation. A single server can run hundreds of containers with minimal overhead.
Fast startup
Containers start in milliseconds - no OS boot required.
Portable
Move containers between servers easily. "Works on my machine" becomes a thing of the past.
Lightweight
Share common libraries across containers, using far less RAM and storage than VMs.
Containers vs virtual machines
Understanding the key differences helps you choose the right tool for the job.
Management via web interface
We use 3rd party web-based management tools so you can deploy, monitor, and manage all your containers through a clean browser interface without using the command line. We also use tools to automatically pull and deploy updated container images when they become available.
Web Ul management
Deploy and manage stacks, containers, networks, and volumes through a visual dashboard - no CLI required.
Automatic updates
Monitors your running containers and automatically redeploys them when a new image version is released.
Kubernetes — advanced orchestration
Kubernetes extends containerisation with more powerful scheduling, self-healing, and configuration management. It’s the industry standard for large-scale container deployments.
Core concept
- Pods – smallest deployable unit
- Services – expose running pods
- Deployments — declarative updates
- ConfigMaps & Secrets
- Namespaces for isolation
- Persistent Volumes
Key capabilities
- Rolling updates & rollbacks
- Horizontal auto-scaling
- Self-healing & restarts
- RBAC security policies
- Service discovery & load balancing
- Integrated monitoring & logging
Advanced features
- StatefulSets for persistent apps
- DaemonSets across all nodes
- Ingress HTTP/S routing
- Helm package manager
- Custom Resource
- Definitions
- Operators for automation
Monitoring & management
- Native monitoring integrations
- Resource quotas & limits
- Network policies
- External load balancer support
- Pod affinity scheduling
- Automatic bin packing
Google Cloud Platform container services
For cloud-hosted workloads, GCP offers a suite of managed container services suited to different scale and complexity requirements.
Core concept
- Serverless containers
- Scales to zero when idle
- Pay-per-use billing
- CI/CD integration
- Security scanning
Artifact Registry
- Centralised image store
- Vulnerability scanning
- Container signing
- Geo-replication
- Fine-grained access control
GKE
- Managed Kubernetes
- Autopilot mode Auto-scaling & updates
- Built-in monitoring
- Stateful app support