Containerized Vertica

A container is an environment where an application and its dependencies run in isolation using controlled resources, without any knowledge of the other processes running on the same host machine. Any machine with a container run-time engine can launch a container using an image that defines the environment.

Because containers require very little overhead, they are often used as a lightweight alternative to virtual machines (VMs). VMs require that you install an operating system on top of your existing infrastructure that you must boot, configure, and maintain. Additionally, the VM operating system consumes more resources than a container because it requires its own system processes in addition to application processes. A container does not require that you install an additional operating system — it uses the container engine to interact directly with the underlying infrastructure's operating system.

For more information about container technologies, refer to the Open Container Initiative.

Vertica Images

Vertica runs on all container runtimes. There are two officially supported options for customers that want to use Vertica in a container:

• Docker image hosted on DockerHub.
• Dockerfile in our official vertica-kubernetes GitHub repository. For details, see Containerized Vertica on Kubernetes.

In addition to our official image options, the Creating a Vertica Image Vertica tutorial in the Vertica Integrator's Guide provides a line-by-line breakdown of our Dockerfile hosted on GitHub. This enables you to add dependencies to replicate your development and production environments.