¶ PORTAINER AND STEELDOME: MODERN CONTAINER MANAGEMENT
SteelDome is proud to partner with Portainer, a leading container management platform, to deliver integrated, scalable, and simplified orchestration solutions through StratiSERV and HyperSERV — all powered by the modular StratiSYSTEM operating system.
This collaboration empowers organizations to deploy, monitor, and manage containers and Kubernetes environments with ease, leveraging the best of Portainer’s intuitive UI and API-driven control on top of SteelDome’s high-performance, enterprise-ready virtualization stack.
¶ WHY PORTAINER
Portainer simplifies the deployment and lifecycle management of containers across both standalone Docker/Podman environments and Kubernetes clusters. Its intuitive interface and deep orchestration capabilities make it the platform of choice for teams managing modern, distributed workloads.
Through seamless integration with StratiSERV and HyperSERV, Portainer users can deploy containerized applications at scale — with full control over compute, storage, and networking — across edge, core, or hybrid environments.
Whether you're running developer workloads, managing microservices, or scaling enterprise Kubernetes environments, SteelDome + Portainer delivers:
✅ Integrated virtualization and orchestration platform
✅ Turnkey deployment of containers and Kubernetes on HCI
✅ Unified management of virtual machines and containers from a single stack
This partnership reduces operational overhead, accelerates time-to-value, and ensures a secure, scalable foundation for modern infrastructure.
¶ A SOFTWARE-DEFINED STACK FOR MODERN CONTAINER ORCHESTRATION
At the core of SteelDome’s integration with Portainer is StratiSYSTEM — a modular infrastructure operating system that unifies compute, storage, and orchestration under a single control plane.
With StratiSERV, users gain a powerful virtualized environment optimized for both traditional VM workloads and container-native applications — ideal for hybrid environments where VMs and containers coexist.
With HyperSERV, Portainer can be deployed as part of a full-stack hyperconverged cluster, offering simplified infrastructure management and maximum efficiency for containerized deployments at scale.
¶ PORTAINER INFRASTRUCTURE
¶ HOW PORTAINER WORKS
The Portainer server core is built as a lightweight container image to run on standard OCI-compatible container runtime environments. It is comprised of three main components:
- A Single Page Application (SPA) based Web Application with the following to serve the front-end UI experience:
- AngularJS and React:
- In the process of migrating AngularJS to React.
- A set of assets (CSS, HTML and JavaScript).
- AngularJS and React:
- Core API is written in Golang to provide REST APIs for backend operations.
- Two BoltDB (a lightweight embedded key/value store) instances:
- Main Portainer data:
- Portainer Settings, Backup, Tunnel Server details, and Version.
- Registries; Docker Hub, AWS ECR, Azure ACR, and so on.
- Users, Teams, and Team Memberships.
- Edge Groups, Stacks, and Jobs.
- Environment details, Groups, Tags, and Relations.
- Application Stacks and Webhooks.
- Custom Templates.
- Audit and Activity logs.
- Main Portainer data:
Portainer also interacts with other external services to support managing container runtime environments:
- Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP and OAuth providers; Azure AD, GitHub, Google… etc.
- Backup Storage Provider; AWS S3 bucket or an S3 gateway.
- Git Repository, such as GitHub or GitLab.
- Container Registry; DockerHub, ACR, ECR, Quay, ProGet, GitLab, GitHub… etc.
- The following binaries are used to establish connections to the underlying container orchestrations over proxy:
- docker Client to execute Docker APIs not supported by the SDK. For instance, Docker Stack management.
- docker-compose to support Docker Compose activities.
- kubectl and helm to support interacting with Kubernetes clusters.
- eksctl and awsAuth to bootstrap an EKS cluster in AWS, part of Portainer’s Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS) feature.
The following diagram depicts the components described above:
¶ HOW PORTAINER WORKS WITH AGENTS ON KUBERNETES
Unlike Docker Swarm, Kubernetes has a control plane object called Kubernetes API Server, which can handle any API operations to manage the underlying Kubernetes cluster. For instance, listing all containers can be handled where aggregation requests are not required. But, in order to execute these API requests, it must go through Kubernetes built-in authentication and authorization process, which is called Kubernetes RBAC.
Due to the nature of Portainer requiring full access to the cluster, as part of the deployment via Kubernetes manifests or Helm, it creates a Service Account called portainer-sa-clusteradmin and bind it with the cluster-admin ClusterRole. This gets used by any administrators within Portainer to manage the underlying cluster. Now, this is called Cluster Requests that allows privileged operations by using the token of this service account to interact with the Kubernetes API server kubernetes.default.svc.
However, for standard users, the process is slightly different. Portainer has the roles pre-built for Kubernetes users; Environment Administrator, Operator, Helpdesk, Standard User, and Read-only User.
The following diagram depicts the components described above:
¶ BENEFITS OF STEELDOME AND PORTAINER
| SEAMLESS INTEGRATION | StratiSERV and HyperSERV are fully compatible with Portainer for container and Kubernetes orchestration. |
| HYBRID WORKLOAD FLEXIBILITY | Run VMs and containers side-by-side with unified visibility and control. |
| EDGE-TO-CORE DEPLOYMENTS | Deploy Portainer on lightweight nodes at the edge or across high-density clusters in the data center. |
| SIMPLIFIED OPERATIONS | Leverage Portainer’s intuitive interface and SteelDome’s automation to streamline day-to-day management. |
| BUILT-IN RESILIENCE | HyperSERV ensures high availability, redundancy, and non-disruptive scaling of container environments. |
¶ WHO IT’S FOR
- DevOps teams managing containers and Kubernetes environments
- Enterprises modernizing infrastructure with a hybrid VM + container approach
- Edge deployments needing lightweight, scalable container orchestration
- MSPs and resellers delivering multi-tenant container hosting solutions
- Organizations seeking a fully integrated container + VM platform
¶ ONE PLATFORM. ANY WORKLOAD. ANYWHERE.
Together, SteelDome and Portainer bring clarity and control to the world of container infrastructure — reducing complexity while maximizing flexibility and scalability. Whether you're running containers in a lab, across the enterprise, or at the far edge, StratiSERV and HyperSERV provide the full-stack foundation for success.
Container management doesn't have to be complicated. With SteelDome and Portainer, it's never been simpler.