Rackspace Adds Cloud-Based Docker Container Service with Carina

Rackspace (RAX) has jumped into the containers-as-a-service field in a big way with the announcement of a hosted Docker-based container service for the cloud called Carina.

Currently available as a beta offering, Carina provides a managed implementation of Docker containers. Rackspace describes it as "instant-on" container solution that saves customers from having to build, manage and update a container environment manually.

Rackspace is presenting Carina as a pure-play version of Docker. The service uses Docker's native API for tooling, Docker Swarm for orchestration and the Docker engine itself for running containers. That approach "provides developers the freedom to easily move applications from development to test to production environments, while helping to reduce errors and saving time," the company said.

In announcing Carina, Rackspace also emphasized the "bare-metal performance" that it can deliver. That's because Carina containers run on bare-metal servers, not inside virtual machines. This features makes Carina "very much different from other offerings," a Rackspace representative said in an email.

Rackspace's decision to play up the performance advantages of its containers-as-a-service offering suggests that it sees Carina as a way to attract customers who have been hesitant to adopt other cloud-based solutions because of performance concerns. For those users, a hosted container service may be worth investigating, and not just because "containers" have become a favorite buzzword.