Many public clouds are investing heavily in compute services that utilize containerization technologies, often referred to as containers as a service (CaaS). These technologies solve entire classes of problems by abstracting away underlying virtual machines and networking components, allowing developers to build and deploy applications inside Linux containers.

Container technologies such as Docker allow developers to manage services somewhere between the application layer and the system layer, giving developers the ability to package the entire runtime environment including the application, external dependencies, and operating system components.

For Google Cloud, CaaS takes the form of GKE. Building on top of the open source Kubernetes project, GKE allows developers to package and deploy applications inside Docker containers while Google manages the underlying...