Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Microcontainers vs OpenStack: What are the differences?
What is Microcontainers? Tiny, Portable Docker Containers. 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.
What is OpenStack? Open source software for building private and public clouds. OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.
Microcontainers and OpenStack are primarily classified as "Container" and "Open Source Cloud" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Microcontainers are:
- 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).
On the other hand, OpenStack provides the following key features:
- Compute
- Storage
- Networking
Microcontainers is an open source tool with 1.56K GitHub stars and 137 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Microcontainers's open source repository on GitHub.
Pros of Microcontainers
Pros of OpenStack
- Private cloud60
- Avoid vendor lock-in39
- Flexible in use23
- Industry leader7
- Robust architecture5
- Supported by many companies in top5004