The Container Manager Pattern

A container manager orchestrates and manages distributed environments composed of groups or clusters of software containers. Virtual machines have long been the option when it comes to virtualization solutions in clouds but containers provide a more portable, reusable and lightweight alternative. Containers provide operating system level virtualization where applications are executed in isolated environments sharing a host operating system, binaries, and libraries with other containers. Software containers although not new, have become very important to support convenient, and low overhead applications. Containers facilitate application deployment and distribution across computing environments. Containers are not the only components in the environment but work closely with other components that manage and support them. We present a pattern for a Container Manager which describes these components along with the required functions of this manager.