Filling an Often-Unspoken Gap in Container Management

TLDR: Portainer helps companies big and small simplify their container management. It empowers IT teams and operations staff to manage their containers effectively, regardless of their knowledge and skill set. We spoke with Neil Cresswell, Co-Founder and CEO of Portainer.io, about the platform and how it bridges the knowledge gap in containerization.

There are some success stories that seem to happen overnight while others may take years to come to fruition. For Neil Cresswell, it was the latter with his company Portainer.

Neil launched Portainer in 2017 after he first encountered Docker technology. Docker was known for its revolutionary design and capabilities that would change the trajectory of organizational IT infrastructure.

But it had one problem: It was too complex. So Neil set out to build a tool that would democratize containerization and make Docker simpler to use for everyone. Or as Neil envisioned, a Robin Hood technology to help small businesses leverage Docker’s capabilities at a fraction of the cost and resources.

Today, Portainer simplifies various aspects of container management, from life cycle management and monitoring to deployment and triage. It has also added IoT/edge management solutions and full support for Kubernetes and GitOps. It was a long road to get there.

“Portainer is indeed 8 years old… but in all honesty, we only started to get serious 4 years ago, that was when we took our first steps into the world of venture funding and turned a project into a product with a company,” said Neil.

Neil is not only the Co-Founder of Portainer but also the CEO. He’s been there through every step and trial Portainer has experienced. Although the team struggled in its early years, Portainer is so much more than it was during its origins.

“Our longevity tells a great story about the product’s attractiveness and ability to solve real problems,” said Neil.

Since 2017, Portainer has grown from a humble project into a full-fledged, funded platform. It acquired funding, found new ways to monetize, grew its team, and maintained its community all while keeping up with the ever-changing cloud-native landscape.

“I am most proud of the fact that we are actually still here and going strong after 8 years, with a loyal user group and an ever-increasing customer base that loves the simplicity that Portainer brings,” said Neil.

Portainer has evolved and added various solutions and features throughout the years. But its core mission remained: to bridge the knowledge gap and make container management accessible for everyone.

“Portainer fills an often-unspoken gap in the market… the space in between experts, and regular users,” said Neil.

Neil told us the container industry primarily focuses on providing tools to DevOps engineers and teams but doesn’t truly produce anything for companies with fewer resources or technical staff. Portainer allows companies of all sizes to take advantage of containerization.

“Portainer takes the raw ingredients of Docker, Podman, and Kubernetes, overlays the missing management and operational tooling, and turns them into container platforms to deliver Containers as a Service to internal business users,” said Neil.

Portainer serves both dev teams and smaller organizations, giving them the tools to manage and deploy their containers without doing all the hard stuff. The platform sets itself up as an anti-complexity layer. Experts can set standards, templates, and other elements, so lower-skilled colleagues can use the platform with the complex items pre-completed.

“Portainer makes it radically simple to configure centralized user authentication, centralized role-based access control, centrally apply security and operational policies, and it lets you do all of this without needing to know how to complete this setup in the underlying Kubernetes or Docker environments,” said Neil.

These qualities are great for dev teams because they can help them avoid security or production issues caused by errors or skill gaps within their teams. Portainer has simplified container management for more than 1 million users and provides various tool integrations as well.

All You Need Under One Roof

Neil told us Portainer aims to be the only tool users need to take the raw container runtime/orchestrator and transform it into a fully fledged platform.

“You don’t need additional external tooling with Portainer, everything is all built-in. Portainer doesn’t try to be the best tool in any one area. It aims to be a great tool in many areas,” said Neil.

Portainer offers functionality for a wide range of tasks, including automating GitOps updates, security logging, and using guided forms. You can check out the full list of features here. Let me say you can do almost anything with this platform.

Another highlight of the Portainer platform is its user interface. The UI plays a significant role in establishing the simplicity Portainer offers and how users interact with the platform.

“Portainer lets you ‘choose your own adventure’ within the UI. By that, I mean you get to choose how much assistance you want the UI to provide, from heavily abstracted, no-code deployments to full GitOps, and everything in between,” said Neil.

Portainer enables users to drive the experience how they want with its UI flexibility. Your team may need a high level of assistance or no assistance at all, depending on your skill set. And Portainer ensures you get a user experience that works for you.

Portainer is a universal container platform with no vendor lock-in.

Portainer’s intuitive, self-service UI gives you the freedom to do what you need with your container applications. It allows users to inspect container application deployments, configure their own GitOps pipelines, scale applications, and monitor platform health.

Neil also offered advice on CI/CD pipeline usage. Automated CI/CD allows teams to leverage reproducibility as a way to reduce the operational cost of their applications. So whenever you deploy your app, you can remove time-consuming variables from the runtime configuration.

But Neil says teams should have 100% certainty that their applications will be deployed the same way every time to truly benefit from automated CI/CD pipelines. One wrong commit can send everything crashing down with your production in seconds.

“It is beholden on the person creating the pipelines to ensure there are sufficient testing and approval points in the automation loop. They should also configure the application deployments with health checks so apps do not come online if they are in an error state,” said Neil.

He said CI/CD is another level of abstraction, which requires you to build on a solid base. Your platform needs to be properly secured and governed to reap the maximum benefits of CI/CD. Neil said if it’s not, there will be nothing to stop an automation loop from deploying hostile applications by accident or through leaked credentials.

“You should always ensure you have the underlying protections in place,” said Neil.

IoT and Edge solutions weren’t originally a part of Portainer’s value proposition. But as the company grew, it increased its capabilities and offerings. Now, it has Portainer for Edge, which enables businesses to secure app deployment and device management for industrial IoT and edge devices.

“We have customers running tens of thousands of Docker Hosts at the edge. And when you have that scale, how do you ensure that your application is running the right version, and error free?” Neil said.

Container management issues are amplified at scale with edge and IoT setups. Businesses are having to juggle and oversee thousands of devices. What Portainer’s edge feature set does is turn on a wealth of fleet management capabilities, including observability, for these businesses.

Here is how Portainer for Edge works:

• First, you deploy ‘edge’ agents on remote devices to facilitate remote management of those devices, which is available with no direct inbound internet connectivity or highly sporadic network connectivity.
• You can then group the remote devices into logical organizational groups and deploy applications to the groups, with the application deployment files optionally being held in Git.
• Once you’re done with the first two steps, you can distribute files to remote devices, either to all devices or specific devices based on a matching criteria.

Neil said Portainer’s onboarding process allows users to do all this with simple pre-staging and hands-free onsite deployment. Once the devices are onboarded and manageable, Portainer will give you full visibility into each application the devices are running and the version.

“You can see error logs, interact with container consoles, track performance and resource consumption. And you can do all of this over high-latency and low bandwidth connections. True power,” said Neil.

What’s Ahead

As for what’s ahead, the team is focused on reducing complexity for Kubernetes users. Neil said Kubernetes has become unavoidable and companies will have to leverage moving forward. But many teams can’t be bothered with its complexity. So the Portainer team wants to make it more accessible for all businesses.

“At the end of the day, Kubernetes itself isn’t complex, the ecosystem is. There is simply too much choice of products, too much interoperability to worry about, and too much deep configuration to memorize. We want to alleviate that complexity,” said Neil.