Introducing Container as a Service

We’re excited to announce the public beta availability of our new product, Gcore Container as a Service (CaaS). Container as a Service simplifies your container application deployment in the cloud for serverless, intuitive container execution. Simply select a supported region, pull the image of your container, and run it through the Gcore Customer Portal or REST API. Gcore manages the underlying infrastructure, removing the need to deploy and maintain servers or virtual machines. Read on to learn how to get started for free during public beta!

What Is Gcore Container as a Service?

Gcore Container as a Service (CaaS) is the easiest way to run containers in the cloud. There’s no need to create and maintain virtual machines, servers, or container orchestrators; Gcore manages all the underlying infrastructure. You simply run containers in the cloud and pay only for the time they operate. (While CaaS is in beta, it’s completely free to use.)

Why Choose Gcore CaaS?

The main benefits of CaaS are as follows:

• Serverless approach: CaaS frees you from managing VMs, bare metal servers, and container orchestrators like Kubernetes.
• Security: Simply enable API key authentication to protect your containers from unauthorized access. You can also use private registries to pull verified containers.
• Autoscaling: Use traditional autoscaling to manage sudden increases in traffic. Enable the scale-to-zero option to launch containers only when requests are made.
• Cost-effectiveness: You only pay for the duration your containers are operational.

Use Cases for Gcore CaaS

Gcore Container as a Service is particularly useful in three scenarios:

• AI/ML inference at the edge. Using CaaS to run an ML model serving IoT devices reduces the latency between the model and the device. You’re only charged for the time the container is running, improving your ML model’s financial efficiency.
• Optimizing microservices workflow. CaaS simplifies and optimizes microservice and distributed system deployment. For example, each event-driven microservice can run in its own container on demand and scale automatically when needed.
• Integration with third-party services. With Gcore Container as a Service, you can quickly deploy and scale containerized applications through API integration with third-party tools for simplified developer workflows. We support the integration of CaaS and a CI tool like GitHub Actions: a developer makes a commit to a code repository, a CI tool pushes the new image to a registry, and CaaS pulls the built image to run the application in the container. Try the CaaS GitHub Actions integration for yourself.

How to Get Started

1. Log in to the Gcore Customer Portal. If you are not registered, sign up using your email, Google, or GitHub account.

2. From the left menu, click Cloud, then Containers. You will see this window:

3. Click Create container. If you see the note “You need to request quota increase to create this instance” in the top right corner, click Ask for quotas. You will then see this window:

Specify the required quota values, add a brief explanation—for example, “For testing”—and click Send request. Checking and approving requests usually takes just a few minutes.

4. Configure your container following these instructions and click Create container. If everything is configured correctly, your container status will change to “Started” within a few minutes and you can start using Gcore CaaS.

Conclusion

Gcore Container as a Service is in the beta testing stage, and you enjoy it for free. Check out our documentation to learn how to configure containers, analyze their logs, and deploy containers to CaaS via GitHub Actions. As always, we’re here to help if you need assistance with CaaS (or any other Gcore product.)

Try Gcore Container as a Service