Containers as a Service (CaaS) is a cloud service model that provides a managed platform for deploying, running, and orchestrating containerized applications without the overhead of managing underlying infrastructure. CaaS sits between traditional Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), offering developers fine-grained control over containers while abstracting away complexity around servers, networking, and storage. It encompasses everything from container runtimes and orchestration engines to registries, networking layers, security scanners, and observability tools—all working together to enable scalable, portable, and efficient application delivery. The key insight that makes CaaS indispensable in 2026 is that containers have become the universal deployment unit, and CaaS platforms handle the entire lifecycle—from building and scanning images to routing traffic, scaling workloads, and ensuring high availability—so teams can focus on application logic rather than infrastructure plumbing. Understanding how these components integrate forms the foundation of modern cloud-native engineering.
What This Cheat Sheet Covers
This topic spans 20 focused tables and 120 indexed concepts. Below is a complete table-by-table outline of this topic, spanning foundational concepts through advanced details.
Table 1: Container Runtimes
| Runtime | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
Industry standard container runtime interface used by Kubernetes; manages image transfer, container execution, and storage; OCI-compliant and CRI-native. | ||
Lightweight Kubernetes-native container runtime; implements Kubernetes CRI specification directly; designed for production Kubernetes environments with minimal overhead. | ||
docker run -d -p 80:80 nginx | Widely adopted container platform with integrated image building, CLI tools, and daemon; uses containerd as underlying runtime; ideal for local development. |