Cloud hosting provider Rackspace Inc. is now offering containers-as-a-service through in beta through its newly announced Carina service.

Carina is a hosted Docker-based container service that’s currently only available to customers in the U.S. It provides a fully managed implementation of Docker containers, which Rackspace describes as an “instant-on solution that means customers don’t have to bother building, managing or updating their container environments manually.

Rackspace is painting Carina as a kind of pure-play Docker implementation. The service uses Docker’s native API for tooling, the Docker engine for running containers, and Docker Swarm for orchestration. It’s an approach that ensures developers have the “freedom to easily move applications from development to test to production environments, while helping to reduce errors and saving time,” the company claims.

Rackspace was also keen to emphasize the “bare-metal performance” that the service can deliver, but we should note this is hardly unique to Carina. After all, Carina doesn’t work any differently to other container environments, and they all offer a performance advantage that comes from not needing to use a hypervisor.

No doubt, Rackspace is playing up the ‘performance spin’ because it sees Carina as a way to attract customers who have previously been hesitant to adopt cloud-based solutions over concerns they might impact performance. In addition, Rackspace also pointed to Carina’s ability to scale applications, therefore boosting “application density” in the cloud. Carina also helps to deliver enterprise apps in almost-real time, the company said.

Scott Crenshaw, senior vice president for strategy and product at Rackspace, said in a statement that Carina also extends the company’s plan to support OpenStack deployments in enterprise clouds. The service “leverages the infrastructure capabilities of OpenStack,” he said.

The Carina container tool is available now as a free beta offering on the Rackspace Public Cloud.

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