Containers separate your applications from the OS. You can move your apps across hosts seamlessly with a simple command. You can also do this with VMs but containers are lightweight, easier to access and manage and move across hosts and avoid lock-in to any hardware or cloud provider.
Flockport chose LXC containers because they behave like light weight VMs, offer a standard OS environment and thus allow the seamless migration of workloads from VMs to containers without the need for any reengineering or rearchitecture. So end users can benefit from all the flexibility of containers without adopting technical debt and management overhead.
Flockport currently supports LXC containers. Flockport adds a number of capabilities on top of LXC including automated service discovery, advanced cluster management and networking features, auto-healing, auto-recovery and more.
Flockport also provides an application build system based on LXC containers for replicable application deployments across multiple environments
LXC containers provide a standard OS environment and behave like light weight VMs. This significantly reduces the complexity that comes with platforms that use Docker style single process containers.
Docker uses a different kind of container, a single process container. This is a non standard OS environment and adds technical debt and complexity to containers. Here is a quick guide to help you understand the differences between LXC and Docker containers. Flockport is focussed on the seamless migration of workloads from VMs to containers and easy application mobility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
The Flockport App Store hosts the most popular open source applications in containers. To use the apps just download the container, start it and access the app in your browser.
This simplifies things for end users as there is no need to setup applications, install dependencies or configure databases. Even better the containers are self contained and can be moved across servers and cloud providers easily.
The App Store free to use and accessible from the Flockport app. All apps are signed and downloaded securely. App builds are automated with Flockport Recipes.