Portainer CE is a great way of managing clusters, provisioning containers and services and managing container environment lifecycles. To extend the benefit of Portainer CE even more, and to address the needs of larger, complex or critical environments, the Portainer team provides a growing range of low-cost Extensions.
As the diagram shows, running a successful production container environment requires a range of capability across a number of complex technical areas.
Available through a simple subscription process from the menu, Portainer Extensions answers this need and provides a simple way to enhance the functionality that Portainer makes available through incremental capability in important areas.
The vision for Portainer is to be the standard management layer for container platforms. In order to achieve this vision, Portainer CE will be extended across a range of new functional areas. In order to ensure that Portainer remains the best choice for managing production container platforms, the Portainer team have chosen a modular extensible design approach, where additional capability can be added to the Portainer CE core as needed, and at very low cost.
The advantage of an extensible design is clear: While a range of capability is available, only necessary functionality is added as and when needed.
Our first extension is Registry Manager, available now. Others (such as Single Sign On and Operations Management) are scheduled for the early part of 2019.
Portainer CE is the core of the Portainer management environments. Portainer CE will continue to be developed and made freely available as part of our deep commitment to our Open Source heritage and our user community. Portainer CE will always deliver great functionality and remain the industry standard toolset for managing container-based platforms.
Portainer must be connected to the Internet to fetch the list of available extensions.