Rackspace has launched a new ‘instant container’ offering which it says will take the strain out of building infrastructure.

The Carina by Rackspace, unveiled at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, has now been made available as a free beta version. Carina makes containers portable and easy to use, claims Rackspace, which devised the system for making containerized applications faster. The service uses bare-metal performance, a Docker Engine, a native container tooling and Docker Swarm in order maximise processing power without sacrificing any control.

Typically a user might be a developer, data scientist or cloud operator who wants to outsource the infrastructure management to Rackspace’s experts which, says the vendor, saves time them on building, managing and updating their container environment.

With container technology being one of the fastest-growing software development tools in computing, companies adopting this unknown technology are likely to face unforeseen management challenges. Though containers consume a fraction of the computing resources of typical virtual machines, they could eat up a lot of management time, warns Scott Crenshaw, Rackspace’s SVP of strategy and product. The savings yielded by Container technology’s instant availability, application scaling and high application density, could be neutralised by the time and money spent on learning new infrastructure management skills, he said.

The Carina service will save customer from that waste, said Crenshaw. “Our mission is to support OpenStack’s position as a leading choice for enterprise clouds,” said Crenshaw, “Carina design makes containers fast, simple and accessible to developers using OpenStack.”

With no hypervisor overhead, an easy installation process and instant support, everything is designed to run faster, said Nick Stinemates, VP business development of container maker Docker. “You can get started in under a minute. The Carina beta from Rackspace makes it fast and simple to start a Docker Swarm cluster. They have put the Docker experience front and centre without any abstraction,” said Stinemates

Carina is now available as a free beta offering on the Rackspace Public Cloud for US customers.