By
Iron.io
Iron.ioMicrocontainers
What is Microcontainers?
A Microcontainer contains only the OS libraries and language dependencies required to run an application and the application itself. Nothing more. Rather than starting with everything but the kitchen sink, start with the bare minimum and add dependencies on an as needed basis.
Microcontainers is a tool in the Container Registry category of a tech stack.
Key Features
Size — MicroContainers are small. As shown above, without changing any code the image is 22 times smaller than a typical image.Fast/Easy Distribution — Because the size is so much smaller, it’s much quicker to download the image from a Docker registry (eg: Docker Hub) and therefore it can be distributed to different machines much quicker.Improved Security — Less code/less programs in the container means less attack surface. And, the base OS can be more secure (more below).
Microcontainers Pros & Cons
Pros of Microcontainers
No pros listed yet.
Cons of Microcontainers
No cons listed yet.
Microcontainers Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Microcontainers?
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
Docker Compose
With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.
Rancher
Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.
