Caasa

Overview

CaaSa (Container as a Service) is a platform that allows users to outsource the administration of a handful of containers to their co-workers. It provides a simple web-interface to handle basic container admin tasks such as viewing resource consumption, restarting and stopping containers, viewing logs, executing terminal commands, and browsing the filesystem.

Features

• View resource consumption and runtime behavior of containers
• Restart and stop containers
• View logs and process tree of containers
• Execute terminal commands inside containers
• Browse the filesystem and upload/download files
• Restrict permissions per container and user

Installation

To deploy CaaSa, it is highly recommended to use a reverse-proxy with TLS termination in front of CaaSa for production environments. Roles can be defined via environment variables and may contain permissions for managing containers. The available permissions include:

• info: display basic container metadata
• info-annotations: display environment variables and container labels (may contain secrets)
• state: allow start, stop, restart container
• logs: display container terminal output
• term: spawn (root privileged) terminal inside container
• procs: display running processes
• files: list files and directories in container
• files-read: user can download files from container
• files-write: user can upload files to container

Authentication in CaaSa can be done through the following methods:

• Restful authentication: CaaSa sends HTTP POST requests to the URL defined in the AUTH_API_URL environment variable with a JSON body containing the username and password. The field names for the JSON are defined in the AUTH_API_FIELD_USERNAME and AUTH_API_FIELD_PASSWORD environment variables.
• Dummy authentication: Set the AUTH_API_URL environment variable to a test URL. Any username and password combination will be accepted, but this method is not suitable for productive usage.
• WebProxy authentication: CaaSa can read the username from an HTTP request header supplied by a reverse proxy in front of CaaSa. The header name can be specified in the WEBPROXY_AUTH_HEADER environment variable.

To make a container visible in CaaSa, it must be annotated with a label defined as “ROLES_” and list all permitted usernames or user IDs. Usernames are treated as case-insensitive.

Summary

CaaSa is a Container as a Service platform that simplifies container administration by providing a web-interface for basic container management tasks. It allows users to view resource consumption, restart and stop containers, view logs, execute commands, browse the filesystem, and manage permissions per container and user. Installation of CaaSa involves deploying it with a reverse-proxy and defining roles and authentication methods. Annotating containers with permissions labels is necessary for them to be visible in CaaSa.