Many of the accounts that install StackEngine Docker management are actually pleasantly surprised to learn that the software runs locally on a host “behind the firewall”. Of course this can be any Linux host that you have access to, a cloud instance on AWS, Google or Digital Ocean. A physical server. A VMware or OpenStack virtual machine. Or even a Linux VM on your laptop.
Running StackEngine for Docker management behind the firewall, provides the following benefits.
Security. Having control of your software, especially one that manages containers located anywhere that you may have compute resource is a good thing. In this way, you control who has access to the host that StackEngine is installed on. Plus, StackEngine can be run in an air-gap environment (an environment that is completely isolated from the public Internet), for even the most secure shops.
Updates. StackEngine will push new updates, with new functionality and bug fixes from time to time. These will be available on our download site, which you can pull at any time. This gives you the flexibility and control as to when you update the software.
Availability. The running of the StackEngine “leader” host is in your control. There is no 3rd party responsible the operations and you can decide how much redundancy and resiliency to build in. StackEngine even offers a high availability config, with a leader and two follower hosts. This configuration would be set up where, if the leader host fails, one of the other follower hosts takes the leadership role. Again, this configuration is totally within your control, and can be spread across availability zones if desired.
Scale. No need to worry about noisy neighbors in a SaaS environment. Your installation of StackEngine is designed to scale across thousands of hosts and tens of thousands of containers. We have tested the scale to over 1000 hosts and 30,000 containers on modestly sized servers. So plenty of room to grow.
But what about app.stackengine.wpengine.com? That’s a SaaS application, isn’t it?
The answer is yes, it is a SaaS app, that is used for licensing and billing. But once you generate a license, you use it locally in your StackEngine instance to set its behavior and feature level. That is pretty much the extent of its use.
So, use our new copy and paste install, to download StackEngine today and check out our latest features for Docker management!
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