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Portainer Overview

Page Background: In this document we would discuss the overview of Portainer.

What is Portainer?​

Behind an intuitive user interface, Portainer conceals the difficulty of managing containers. Portainer makes utilising the CLI or comprehending manifests unnecessary, which makes it easier to solve issues using the Portainer UI.

Why would you like to use Portainer?

Authentication​

Three alternative ways of user authentication are supported by Portainer. The first approach is internal, in which Portainer manages user management and stores user information in the Portainer data folder. The second approach uses LDAP, in which an external LDAP server, like ActiveDirectory, manages the users. The only issue I can identify with LDAP authentication is that environment variables cannot be used to set it. Using OAuth for authentication is the last authentication strategy.

Perform actions on containers​

Some of the actions that can be performed are here as under:

  • Execute deployment orders (start, stop, kill, restart)

  • See the logs

  • Examine the settings.

  • See the resource utilisation, including the CPU and Memory usage

User authorization and resource ownership​

The resources handled by Portainer, may all have their owners configured thanks to Portainer. For choosing the proprietors of each of these resources, Portainer offers three alternatives.

  • Administrators is the primary choice, meaning that only admin users may manage this resource.

  • The second choice is the constrained one. Using this option, you may limit the users who can manage the resource. Access may be granted to teams or a single person.

  • The resource may be managed by any user who has access to the endpoint if they choose the third option, which is public.

Conclusion

With a straightforward and user-friendly online user interface, Portainer is a fantastic solution for managing resources such as Swarm services, clusters. The user experience for managing clusters may be improved by using a number of free features and premium plugins offered by Portainer. On the other hand, a few of the premium plugins still lack some functionality or are subject to limitations that may make the product better.