Portainer

Portainer is a management platform for containerized applications. It can be used to manage Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes, and ACI environments. Portainer consists of two components: the Portainer server and the Portainer agent. The Portainer agent is installed in the environment to be managed. Requests can then be sent to the agent via the Portainer server (such as "run container") and the agent forwards the request (for example, to the Docker socket or the Kubernetes API).

There is also the additional option of using the Portainer Edge agent instead of the Portainer agent. This basically works like the Portainer agent, but in this case the server does not send requests directly to the Edge agent, instead the Edge agent periodically asks the server if it has any tasks for it. As a result, in this case only the edge agent needs to communicate with the server and not the other way around. This is implemented by tunneling. Through the Portainer frontend, Portainer provides a GUI through which the various containerization environments can be managed.

In the case of Docker, the GUI can be used to build, import and export Docker images, install and manage containers, create volumes, etc. These actions are passed from the frontend via the Portainer server and the agent/edge agent directly to the Docker Engine API, which then executes them in the corresponding environment.