1. What is Portainer ?
Portainer: is a Universal Container Management System for Kubernetes, Docker/Swarm, and Nomad that simplifies container operations so you can deliver software to more places, faster.
2. Why Portainer?
Portainer: is designed for organizations that don't have access to container management expertise, but want to exploit the power of containers today.
With an intuitive GUI and a set of sane defaults that get users up and running fast, Portainer dramatically reduces the need for teams to learn Docker and Kubernetes, which leads to faster adoption and time savings right across the organization.
It reduces the operational complexity associated with containers, which speeds up adoption and reduces errors It addresses critical skill shortages by making the technology safely accessible to everyone inside the organization It simplifies the setting-up of 'safe' security configurations within Docker and Kubernetes through centralized IAM.
How To Install Portainer?
1. The Case for Portainer Community Edition(CE): Portainer CE is our general-purpose management toolset that allows individuals and teams of any maturity and any size, to deploy and manage container-native applications with a high degree of ease; a lower cost of operations; and without needing to exclusively invest in any single orchestrator, Kubernetes distribution, container runtime, or cloud provider.
Although primarily designed for use by individuals and discrete teams, Portainer CE does include basic security and access control features that enable team-wide, tiered access to Docker/Kubernetes/Serverless environments. Portainer CE already enables greater collaboration than might otherwise be possible with native single-user tools.
Installation Portainer CE Step-> I am installing as per my requirement, you can chose your options, which you can see following images.
You can find these steps here: Link.
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2. The Case for Portainer Business(BE): But what happens when use of Portainer within your organisation expands, becomes more critical, and starts to come under scrutiny by IT executives who want to know how Portainer complies with corporate IT policies?
CIO's, CISO's and CTO's have a relatively consistent view of what's required of an "enterprise" management toolset. This includes ensuring it has critical security & governance capability, IT finance visibility, integrations with pre-existing IT management toolsets/operational processes and DR/BCP. And of course, the IT executive will want to know how SLA-backed support is obtained for any mission critical software application.
It's simply not possible to have the community edition of Portainer deliver a coherent experience that addresses the needs of hobbyists AND large enterprises; each has vastly different needs. Additionally, as with most open source products, support for Portainer CE is provided by the community through forums and such like. As organizations seek to deploy Portainer in critical parts of their network, the need for formal support becomes important.
Click here to Install Portainer BE
3. Portainer Architecture.
Overview of Portainer architecture: Portainer consists of two elements: the Portainer Server and the Portainer Agent. Both run as lightweight containers on your existing containerized infrastructure. The Portainer Agent should be deployed to each node in your cluster and configured to report back to the Portainer Server container. A single Portainer Server will accept connections from any number of Portainer Agents, providing the ability to manage multiple clusters from one centralized interface. To do this, the Portainer Server container requires data persistence. The Portainer Agents are stateless, with data being shipped back to the Portainer Server container.
4. Agent vs Edge Agent.
In standard deployments, the central Portainer Server instance and any environments it manages are assumed to be on the same network, that is, Portainer Server and the Portainer Agents are able to seamlessly communicate with one another. However, in configurations where the remote environments are on a completely separate network to Portainer Server, say, across the internet, historically we would have been unable to centrally manage these devices. With the new Edge Agent, we altered the architecture. Rather than the Portainer Server needing seamless access to the remote environment, only the remote environments need to be able to access the Portainer Server. This communication is performed over an encrypted TLS tunnel. This is important in Internet-connected configurations where there is no desire to expose the Portainer Agent to the internet.
5. Security and compliance.
Portainer runs exclusively on your servers, within your network, behind your own firewalls. As a result, we do not currently hold any SOC or PCI/DSS compliance because we do not host any of your infrastructure. You can even run Portainer completely disconnected (air-gapped) without any impact on functionality. While we do (optionally) collect anonymous usage analytics from Portainer installations, we remain compliant with GDPR. Data collection can be disabled when you install the product, or at any time after that. If your installation is air-gapped, collection will silently fail without any adverse effects.
6. Portainer Features.
Application Deployment: At its heart, Portainer helps developers deploy cloud-native applications into containers simply, quickly and securely.
Portainer has its own simplified GUI, which makes it easy for users to get started. For advanced users, Portainer incorporates an API that allows it to connect to CI/CD tools or third-party dashboards/deployment tools.
1. Manual deployment options: For users with limited to zero knowledge of containers Portainer’s custom Application Templates are the ultimate “click to deploy” bootstrap for getting commonly used applications up and running fast. The Custom Templates can also be used by developers to rapidly prototype and test against a disposable system, or for repetitive use cases such as QA. To use an Application Template, a user simply needs to deploy an application, tune/configure it as they wish, and then select the option to “save as template”. This applications configuration will now be available to “single click deploy” any subsequent time.
Portainer’s support for HELM charts is limited to Kubernetes clusters, and provides users with the ability to deploy any application that is made available via the Bitnami HELM repo; alternatively, the Portainer administrator can connect Portainer to an internal repository, thereby restricting user deployments from only this trusted repo. Helm charts can be adjusted inside Portainer through our “values” editor, which lets you set whatever options are made available by the publisher of the HELM chart.
2. Automated deployment options: Portainer is more than just a UI, Portainer can also act as a Continuous Deployment (CD) system. DevOps professionals are able to connect Portainer to their Git repos, and Portainer will automatically deploy any application defined in that repo, and ensure any changes that are made in Git are propagated to the running application. This redeploy can either be manual (where organisational policies require so), automated through webhooks (so the CI system can notify Portainer) or automated through our “poller” which checks for changes on a regular schedule.